Tech Forum

Mikerowaved wrote:"Alternate broadcast solutions". Really?

Webcast: How to Broadcast When Troubleshooting Hasn’t Worked
. . . Although there are hundreds of live-stream products in the marketplace that may
meet your specific needs, many have found success using YouTube Live as their alternate product.

What they didn't say is that to use YouTube, you have to break so many rules. Unless your stake conference is the week before or after general conference during the free-for-all period, you can't get there from here unless you bypass the firewall.

I only did it with the approval of the presiding authority: typically but not always, my Stake President.

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.

I'm working on getting setup for my first stake conference streaming broadcast and I can't seem to find any clear information about what the firewall blocks or dosen't block and when. In my testing, youtube seems to be allowed... But is that just around general conference? This document seems to indicate that you can use youtube as an alternative? https://www.lds.org/help/support/bc/cle ... f?lang=eng

Does it have to be unblocked on a case by case basis?

Fwiw: There have been several good recommendations here in the forums that Sunday Streams is good at that sort of thing. I used them myself to stream a funeral to the missionary son outside the US, and I found their skill, systems, and customer service to be excellent. Here is a search for the phrase "Sunday Streams": search.php?keywords=%22Sunday+Streams%22

mitchrichie wrote: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.

rmrichesjr wrote:Fwiw: There have been several good recommendations here in the forums that Sunday Streams is good at that sort of thing. I used them myself to stream a funeral to the missionary son outside the US, and I found their skill, systems, and customer service to be excellent. Here is a search for the phrase "Sunday Streams": search.php?keywords=%22Sunday+Streams%22

I'm guessing Sunday Streams is not blocked by the firewall then?

mitchrichie wrote:I'm guessing Sunday Streams is not blocked by the firewall then?

The sending unit did not appear to have any difficulty connecting, so I'm pretty sure that was okay. For the receiving side, I ran a Raspberry Pi to view the round-trip, and that worked fine, too. Firewall rules can change over time, but it seemed okay a few months ago.

rmrichesjr wrote:

mitchrichie wrote:I'm guessing Sunday Streams is not blocked by the firewall then?

The sending unit did not appear to have any difficulty connecting, so I'm pretty sure that was okay. For the receiving side, I ran a Raspberry Pi to view the round-trip, and that worked fine, too. Firewall rules can change over time, but it seemed okay a few months ago.

It's pretty stressful to just hope a random firewall change doesn't cripple a webcast, especially when we have a member of the 12 visiting. I suppose if we have firewall issues he can make a quick call to HQ and get it resolved?

Our stake has had terrible luck with the church azure cloud based system. Not really sure what to do at this point.

mitchrichie wrote:Our stake has had terrible luck with the church azure cloud based system. Not really sure what to do at this point.

Sometimes glitches are unavoidable, but often times they are. 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. Because we were having a visiting authority, she asked if we were webcasting and could possibly use some assistance in getting it setup. If so, she would put me in touch with their "transmission engineer", who has much experience in assisting other stakes with their webcasting, besides working on large broadcasts like General Conference, the CES Worldwide Devotionals for Young Adults and Regional Stake Conference Broadcasts. If anyone can help you shake out your webcasting issues, I'm sure this brother can. Watch for the email and take advantage of his help. If it still fails to work for you, then you might want to consider an outside streaming service.