[staff]

Live streaming is hardly new on the web. And a lot of startups are focused on it. One of them, Mogulus, now hopes to simplify the process, while upping the quality and adding new options.
Mogulus’ is launching a new desktop application tonight called Procaster. On the front end, it’s a simple app that offers one-button streaming of video out to the web. But behind its simple exterior, the tool has the ability to stream high definition quality video that isn’t possible when encoding on the fly over its current web-based Flash player.
But much more interesting are the side features of the new app. With Procaster, you can easily do both screen and game broadcasting. With the click of a button you can share your desktop screen over the web and talk over it during a live broadcast. Other apps out there allow you to do this, but as Mogulus CEO Max Haot likes to describe it, Procaster allows you to do a “Steve Jobs keynote-like” screencast. That’s because Procaster has a nice feature which allows you to show the desktop screen while also showing a smaller screen of you talking about what is on screen. With the click of a button you can switch between this dual view to just the desktop or to just yourself talking. It’s all quite seamless.
You can also zoom in on any area of a screen to highlight it with the click of a button. And, Procaster features a chat window to allow you to better interact with those watching your stream.
Even more interesting may be the game-casting feature. This allows gamers to broadcast themselves playing a game like World of Warcraft live while talking over it. While you may not see much of a market for this, currently on Mogulus, they are already seeing gamers doing this by way of their own makeshift methods. And some of these streams are getting 20,000 concurrent viewers, Haot tells me.
With Procaster, all of this can be done using any standard computer. Hoat sees this as a potential “game changer for presentation technology.”
Procaster is being unveiled right now at the NY Video Meetup. It will be available to download tonight here. Right now it’s PC-only, but a Mac version is in the works. I took the screen capture below of Haot showing it off to me, live, over the web using Procaster

http://www.procaster.com/