Live Video is harder than it looks!

In short, it was a disaster!

The sound feed all the camera crews got from the mixing desk was rubbish; it was as if the gain was set to high. It was the first time we’ve had trouble with the AV people we use for these events, so I hope it was a once off. Then there were the two other problems that were under my control. The MySQL server seemed to be getting pounded by the shoutbox script I wrote to add text commentary to the live video feed. I think I’ve solved that one by reducing the number of times per minute it checks for updates.

The final problem was with the video signal itself being uploaded to our service provider in Scotland. We had ordered 512kbps (upload) from our ISP but we were only getting 435kbps upload speed. That didn’t worry me too much as we had tested successfully the day before width 385kbps and everything worked fine. But the connection between the encoder and the server kept dropping out periodically. It would automatically reconnect, several seconds later, but it meant that for Joe User, the video experience was unwatchable.

I’m going to approach various ISP’s to see if that can guarantee me at least 1MB uncontended connection in the future and hope that does the trick.

Next big media event: Last weekend of May

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