johnshaw wrote:If be interested to know what failures people have that would send them to YouTube. Because not having 1080p isn't a reason, neither are any of the excuses I've seen on this forum. Whatever people want to do I guess.
I only stream and distribute (throughout the building) in 720P, sometimes 1080i. The key benefit to using YouTube Live is unparalleled overhead. I’m not saying the church should try to match YouTube. I wouldn’t think it prudent to even try. For General Conference, I show the 720P (our projector is only 1280x800) YouTube feed. It ran nearly ten straight hours on Saturday, and six on Sunday with ZERO dropouts. There were over 90K people watching the YouTube stream when President Nelson announced the new temples. No one can compete with YouTube for internet broadcast reliability.
It’s that very reliability or the lack thereof, the pushed us early YouTube adopters away from the official CDN. I’ve had officer sustained votes have to be redone because the church CDN crashed during a three Stake realignment. We’ve had to use a cellphone perched on a stool under the overhead speaker in the library because the church CDN crashed. There were too many dropped frames to count, even on the ‘new’ system. I figure if a family is going to gather their children, in their Sunday Best, to travel to a darkened building, and watch the proceedings on a screen for two hours ... good enough isn’t good enough, especially if we can do better.
As long as my Stake President authorizes it, I’ll use YouTube.
In full disclosure, we recently split our stake again, and we all cram ourselves into the Stake Center. I haven’t had to broadcast in more than a year. If/When the time comes again, it will be little more than a mouse click, and the sharing of a URL to do it again. And, we’ll share the URL with senior missionaries, shut-ins, people traveling to Disneyland and Grandma in Utah. Then, as soon as we say ‘Amen’, I’ll delete the video.
