The Law Courts in Halifax, Nova Scotia, are using VidBlaster as their preferred tool to stream the Hyde Inquiry live to the internet.

"Live-streaming is something completely new for us" Judicial IT Analyst Alain Bouvette says. "We live-streamed a conference in November 2008 by renting a Sony Anycast and connecting it to a laptop running Adobe Flash Media Encoder. [However] because of our network policies, it is very difficult to get rental hardware on the network. We decided to purchase software which could be loaded on our own hardware instead. [...] I am very pleased to have found a product such as VidBlaster Pro and am thrilled to see that many features have been added to it since we purchased it".

"To give you a bit of background, public media cameras are not permitted in our courtrooms. Things may eventually change but for now, that’s how it is. Last February, we streamed a hearing in Halifax and the interested party, Sydney, another city in Nova Scotia, is 4-5 hours drive away. Initially, the courts were going to hook up a Sydney courtroom using videoconferencing equipment [...] so that local residents could watch the hearing. In the end, it was decided that there was enough interest in the hearing so we skipped the videoconferencing approach and opened it up to anyone who wanted to watch. Since then we’ve successfully done more than a half dozen small streaming events using VidBlaster."

"With the Hyde Public Inquiry, we more than exceeded our expectations with respect to viewership. In the first two weeks we had over 11,000 unique visitors from 40 countries. When the Inquiry was going on, the day’s events were on the television, radio, and newspapers.” The Hyde Public Inquiry will resume Oct. 19, you can find the live stream at www.hydeinquiry.ca.

VidBlaster is created by Mike Versteeg of CombiTech, a software development company based in the Netherlands. A seasoned software developer, Mr. Versteeg has over 28 years of experience in creating production-oriented software. For more information, please visit: www.vidblaster.com.

In just a little over a month after VidBlaster v1.0 has been released, v1.02 is now available. Working closely with several major companies that offer (free) streaming video, VidBlaster now offers one-click streaming to Livestream.com, Ustream.com, Justin.tv and Bambuser.com. "This is a great step for us at bambuser being able to offer our users more and more professional tools to share their content", says Måns Adler, Founder of Bambuser. Besides Windows Media, VidBlaster now also integrates support for Flash Media Servers. As always, customer feedback on the VidBlaster forums is helping VidBlaster remain the leader in video broadcast and production software.