YouTube is out [maybe not]

[russellhltn]

3 weeks before our stake conference (held this past weekend) I received a very nice email from the Production Planner for the Broadcast & Events Division at Church Headquarters.

Yes, it appears they're being proactive in helping the STS to have a successful broadcast. I've also gotten one and we are not having any visitors.

[randysteck]

I notice that this issue recurs about every year. To reiterate several previous posts, we are using Sunday Streams and have been doing so for the last 3 years. In that time we've enjoyed 1080P webcasts with no outages or even stutters. The one anomaly we thought was due to Sunday Streams was actually a camera that was double framing during a pan (since fixed).

We made this move to get rid of the laptop at the receive end and use Roku boxes instead (AppleTV and Rpi work also). We found that the laptop was implicated in over half of all our problems. Since this move, webcasts have become trivial for us with literally 20 minute setup of cameras and 5 minutes at remote locations.

Sunday Streams allows payment for the month of use, so it's an annual cost of $100. Well worth the stability we've found. In addition, they are password protected, do not maintain a recording, do not require reservations (just a monthly bandwidth limit which we've never come close to), and have excellent customer support.

I look forward to having a similar system supported by the Church webcast group, whom I've talked with several times. I really hope we get there some day.

[mitchrichie]

Do they have a Roku app? How does it work on the receiving end?

[Mikerowaved]

In my testing, youtube seems to be allowed... But is that just around general conference?

That's been true in the past. I don't know if that's changed.

I've been checking on YouTube each week since the last general conference and it hasn't gone back to being blocked, at least on the "Managed" filter level (least restrictive). Don't know about the other filter levels or if this is permanent, but it looks encouraging for those seeking a backup to the church's portal system.

[mitchrichie]

I finally got an official answer during a phone call with HQ. YouTube will remain unblocked however the church firewall enforced YouTube’s safe-search protocol which gives unreliable results for live-streams. The system can’t detect the content of a live stream so sometimes it will just block it completely.

[natet]

I finally got an official answer during a phone call with HQ. YouTube will remain unblocked however the church firewall enforced YouTube’s safe-search protocol which gives unreliable results for live-streams. The system can’t detect the content of a live stream so sometimes it will just block it completely.

That's unfortunate. We haven't experienced that ourselves, and we generally get to it through the dashboard rather than looking for live streams, so maybe that's why.