This morning for awhile I’ve been checking out a Test Tube experiment from Youtube that allows Youtubers to create their own streaming channel and invite others to share existing YouTube videos. Sharing is as simple as copy/pasting the YouTube permalink URL in the input box and pressing the submit button. This could provide an additional avenue of getting more real-time type feedback on videos you’ve just created and uploaded to YouTube or be a place where folks can hang out and share their favorite videos or maybe something else I’m not even thinking about.

I created a channel called Hmmcast TV (pictured above) that you are welcome to click on, stop by and test if you’d like. You can also create your own streaming channel.

Some things I’ve learned thus far
- You can only be in one stream channel at the same time
- despite the name, nothing actually streams until you pick videos to watch
- a lot of people will come in and out of the channel and never watch anything or say anything. Kind of reminds me of IRC chatrooms
- to view videos in the stream, just click on the videos that others in the channel are watching and queue them up to watch.
- whatever video you are currently watching in the channel will show up next to your name in the channel list and when you chat as your icon
- Surf all stream channels
- if you try and share a video that is marked by the publisher as no embed a message will be displayed that you cannot view
- on some pages songs in the stream channel will say they are featured in your stream channel, see below:

Administration options
On the admin side you can do the following:

- remove videos others have added
- see the last video others on the channel have watched (it seems like the Pacman video is the most popular on the channel as of this writing)
- the creator can promote others to admins on the channel and demote to “normal” permissions
- change the channel settings including the number of “inappropriate” votes before a video is automatically removed from the channel. I set a three strikes number for our official test channel.

Hmm …
It’s too bad you can’t share videos from any video site in an interface like this. I suppose somebody could throw something together like that using IRC and a little code.

This morning dozens of people stopped by from all over the world including: Japan, Australia, Sweden, Denmark and others. A neat reminder that the web is worldwide.

For YouTubers this could be a handy way to share and explore YouTube-only videos. If you stop by the official test Hmmcast TV channel and see me be sure to say hello. My YouTube nick is Mughd which stands for Make yoU Go Hmm Daily. TDavid wasn’t available when I originally registered at YouTube. It would be nice someday if I could use my Google account (TDavid) someday instead.

Feel free to stop by for a few minutes and give this test service a try.

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