Washed It!

Over the last few months, TinyChat has established itself as a highly popular video chat service. Today, the company launched a new product, TinyChat.tv, which competes directly with established companies like Ustream and Stickam. Signing up and getting started with TinyChat.tv only takes a minute. Users can customize their video chat rooms with different themes, background images and colors. The old TinyChat.com, which doesn’t require signups, will continue to work, though users will get access to more features on TinyChat.tv.

Features

TinyChat.tv’s interface will feel very familiar if you used the regular TinyChat before.

Room owners can customize the look and feel of their rooms and decide if they want to force users to sign in with their Twitter or Facebook accounts. One feature we really liked on TinyChat was that users could type a random URL (tinychat.com/12345) and the service would automatically create a room with this URL. This feature hasn’t been enabled on TinyChat.tv yet, but TinyChat’s co-founder Dan Blake tells us that it will come back soon.

For $9.95 per month, users can also buy a pro membership that allows them to set passwords for rooms and stream higher quality video.

For Developers: Free Streaming with TinyChat API

For developers, TinyChat now offers a comprehensive free application programming interface (API) that makes it easy for developers to create their own Ustream clones. Indeed, TinyChat.tv itself was built on top of this API. Earlier today, Dan Blake told us that TinyChat will not charge developers for bandwidth. Stickam currently charges $0.45 per gigabyte for its streamAPI white label service.

Overall, this is a nice upgrade to the regular TinyChat experience. The old TinyChat, where users don’t need to sign up will continue to operate. The big development is the API, however, and we are looking forward to seeing what developers will do with it.

Tinychat ist ein Startup das es ermöglicht innerhalb von wenigen Sekunden einen Chat mit Videofunktion zu öffnen. Dadurch können unter anderem Diskussionen die auf Twitter entstanden sind ausführlich bei Tinychat diskutiert werden, jetzt erweitert Tinychat sein Angebot und startet eine Live Video Streaming Portal.

Auf der Webseite Tinychat.tv kann man ab sofort einen eigenen Kanal eröffnen, dieses System funktioniert wie die erfolgreiche Dienste Ustream und Stickam. Entstanden ist die Plattform auf der Basis der Tinychat API – welche Funktionen die neue Plattform von Tinychat dem Benutzer bietet erfährt man auf der Webseite unter tinychat.tv.

Posted by Howard, Ignition Officer

With Tinychat.tv recently entering the live video streaming space, I thought it would be a great time to chime in with some thoughts on Tinychat.com and how it can be leveraged effectively to connect with students. We’ve been testing Tinychat for a while with clients and believe it can be a great tool to build relationship with prospective students.

Tinychat is an extremely simple video chat platform that allows up to 400 people to chat and 12 people to broadcast audio and video at once. The part that makes it truly “simple” is the login process. Users do not need to sign up for an account and can simply enter with a nickname or login with Twitter or Facebook Connect.

(Tinychat interface – Recent chat with some teammates from summer trip)

After Tinychat’s relaunch in May 2009, TinyChat has seen steady growth and has begun edging out Tokbox in unique traffic. Tinychat has been beating out Tokbox for one reason: the ease of use.

Now onto the fun part, how Tinychat can be used to reach students on the web. One way is to use student bloggers (or just students) and host a student panel through Tinychat. All they would need to do is login from their respective rooms and broadcast! A quick fan page post letting fans know it is going on can drive traffic to the session. The chat will be very organic compared to a regular, scheduled chat. The “impromptu” chats should prove to still be successful, as we’ve seen Facebook Fan Pages drive traffic well in the past. With Tinychat premium you can control who broadcasts, so that only your bloggers can broadcast while prospective students ask questions via text in chat. Another way is to have an admissions counselor do the exact same thing. Imagine being a prospective student with a question and having an e-mail back that says, “Do you just want to video chat? Talk with my at tinychat.com/(name).” Not only is it an opportunity to build relationship, but it gives a great human side to an admissions process that can seem very hostile to prospective students.
Another great perk of using Tinychat is that the users pretty much spread the word for you. When prospective students logon using Facebook Connect (as many do), Tinychat will publish to their Live Feed that they are currently chatting at X room. It looks like this:

Hope these ideas have helped start a good conversation on how Tinychat can be leveraged to connect with students; these are only the start of great ways Tinychat can be used. What do you think? Do you have any other ideas?

Notes:

Premium Membership details (may not be available with recent update):

Tinychat occasionally has audio problems and at times users have trouble getting their wecams connected. Make sure to plan ahead! If you have problems, Tinychat has great customer service: