Wirecast for Mac

Excellent professional live web streaming solution

It's not often that you get a user-friendly broadcasting suite that's good enough for professional use, but that's exactly what Wirecast offers.

Perfect for live webcasts

Wirecast is an accessible broadcast environment that's ideal for producing professional webcasts on a relatively cheap budget. Wirecast allows you to use multiple live/recorded video sources and mix them together as if you were in a TV recording studio. You can connect external devices to read video, although some users have reported this can be temperamental due to conflicts with their cameras and webcams.

The latest version of Wirecast has been updated to add some useful new streaming features, enabling you to encode and broadcast in a wide range of formats. It also supports streaming for iPhone, allowing you to set yourself up as a broadcaster on the move.

Wirecast allows you to add sliding transitions between feeds, and video sources can be cropped less than one minute before airing.

Extensive tutorials to get you going

Although it's user friendly it's still quite a big broadcasting app to get your head around, so you may need to watch several tutorial videos before you are up and running.

There are some technical issues to be aware of too. Some users report on forums that the source material paths and capture devices are remembered with a project, so Wirecast may not be very flexible when sources are changed or material is renamed/moved.