Ever dreamt of running your own TV channel? If you want to give it a try, have a look at Kyte. You can make your own shows and broadcast them to the world through the Kyte web site, any other website with the Kyte player embedded, or to anyone who has Kyte on their mobile phone. The Kyte player currently works on many sites including Facebook, MySpace, and various blogs. It sounds like YouTube but Kyte takes the YouTube concept a step further by adding channels. On Kyte many people can contribute to a single channel with one producer selecting the shows which go on. Or you can just run a channel as a personal communication tool. There are also community tools so that people can comment on channels, blog or have real-time chats with text, voice and video using the player on a website, or directly from their mobile.

WHO WOULD USE IT?

There is something for everyone on Kyte. It is a place to show everything from your video mashups to slideshows of your cats. You could use Kyte while on holiday by setting up a channel and using the lifestream option which regularly sends images from your mobile on a preset time interval. If you're out shopping and want your friend's opinion on what shirt you should buy, you can upload photos of the shirts from your phone so they can check out the photos on their phone or PC.

WALK THROUGH

To get the Kyte phone software, you visit the website (http://www.kyte.tv/mobile/index.html?mc=3n) to enter your phone number and the site will send an SMS with the link to the software in the message. Clicking on the links takes you to the download site.

Or alternately, you can use your phone's browser to go directly to http://mobile.kyte.tv/?mc=3n to download the software.

You can create a Kyte account either from the phone or from the website and then you're ready to start populating your own TV channel.

However, it's worth spending a little time on the web site to start with. On the web site you can do things like selecting a channel name and creating the look of the channel with a background image and different colours. You can also decide to either allow anyone to add content to your channel or to control who can add content with a password. You can also embed your new TV channel in your blog, Facebook, MySpace profile or anywhere else you like. With the channel you get a URL and an email address in the channel name.

Using the phone software you can create real-time shows from the application, and upload new shows to your channel. You can also email images or video to a channel and display them on your channel. The subject of the email becomes the heading of the show and the text from the body of the email becomes the show's text.

On the phone you can watch shows and comment on them or take part in the polls that are embedded in the shows. You can chat with your friends from anywhere, you can monitor how many people are watching, and you can see what is going on in your own channel.