Watch live shows at nicovideo

April 30, 2009

Nicovideo has for a couple of months now had user live shows and they recently added 300 live slots that you as a user can choose and send a live show from. Live shows at nicovideo variate from typical radio-shows where someone just talks to the people watching and answer their questions to commercial shows where artists, sportsmen and politicians broadcast programs or shows usually featuring something they want to sell to the viewers.

You have to be a premium member to be able to send live shows at nicovideo, so you probably know enough to fill in the forms already. You might not know that you can instead of waiting for an open slot, reserv slots though. Each live-slot costs 500 JPY for 30 minutes of broadcasting time. There are some people that buy a whole day or even more worth of broadcasting time just so they can continue to do their program without having to hunt open slots, so get some webmoney and buy a slot if you feel like your program is worth the time!

One thing about the live shows at nicovideo is that they are terribly organized. All shows belong to a channel/community, but you can as a normal user only sort the active shows by viewers, comments or community ranking. This makes it hard to actually find anything that interest you since the only sane thing is to search among the on-going liveshows instead of trolling the communities for a tag that might interest you and THEN check if that community does live shows. There are tools that makes the work easier for you though.

The user live show catalogue is one of those user-created tools that makes it a lot easier to find something that might interest you. The shows ranked here all have tags and you can sort them by community ranking, members in community, viewers a day etc. It also shows if a show is on right now, both at nicovideo and stickcam.

There are also programs that can check if something interesting is on. This is especially useful since you can get alerts from these programs, which you normally can’t since the live shows don’t have RSS streams. ニコ生アラート is for windows and ニコなまMac is for OS X. They might need a bit of work before they actually do something, but it’s pretty straight forward.

Keep an eye on the live-schedule since there are some interesting things going on – anime broadcasts, artists, sports and even big events. What kind of show do you want to watch live at nicovideo?

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