We’ve had a lot of requests for broadcasting our meetings live. And while we really want to, there is no internet connection (wired or wireless) at PS41 that AENY can access.
We would love to use Ustream, but according to their bandwidth requirements:
“Depending on your set-up and settings, broadcasting will dominate between 300-700kbps.”
Right now, we have 0kbps, but even if we got some kind of wireless connection, we’d need at least that much.
We have some money in the budget to cover wireless internet fees, but we haven’t found a good option for doing this yet.
Do you have any suggestions? Please post them here.
Comments
TheRedOwl
If you’re looking for a cheap option, either LiveStream or uStream are both good options. Some tips: don’t allow AENY attendees to use the wireless Internet. Have one computer dedicated to the task of broadcasting. The person running the computer doing the broadcasting should not be doing anything else that takes bandwidth- such as browsing YouTube, facebook, etc. Hope this helps!
January 19, 2010
David L Good
Aharon Rabinowitz asked for suggestions (through Twitter) so here is my $0.02
I ran into a similar issue with a small church group that wanted to stream services for those who were sick or otherwise unable to attend. They had no available internet connection at the building.
A member was nice enough to donate a Sprint 3G USB modem. The modem had no problems uploading audio/video streams at 400kbps (they’re also in a strong 3G signal area, typically seeing 80% – 100% signal strength — although I’m not sure if signal strength is a good indicator for limitations on bandwidth limitations). I was able to get it to push higher data rates, but they only needed 400, so that’s what we set it at.
The workflow I created for them was through QuickTime Broadcaster, pushing to a Wowza streaming server hosted through Amazon web services, AWS). The cost was insanely cheap (the biggest costs being the 3G card, which was paid for by someone else; the Wowza/Amazon service cost less than $25 per month, but they also have low online attendance and only stream for about 3 hours each week).
If you’re willing to live with the advertisements placed in your web stream Ustream, Qik, LiveStream, and many others are great places to get free distribution. The 3G card has no issues pushing data to those sources.
Not sure if 4G is available in your area (also by Sprint) but I’m sure that would give you even better upload data potential.
If you’re willing to live with the ads, and want to use one of the free services (Ustream, Qik, LiveStream, etc.) most of them have online broadcasting tools (so you don’t have to use QuickTime Broadcaster, Wirecast, etc.) or, if you’re pushing from a Windows machine you can always download the Free Adobe Flash Live Enocder 3, which will encode and push your stream to any media server you like.
Hope that helps somewhat.
January 19, 2010
astro
Why does it need to be live? Why not a recorded broadcast with all the dead space cut out of it?
January 19, 2010
Aharon Rabinowitz
Astro- we could take questions from around the world… Or maybe we just don’t want to capture, edit, and compress.
David – good stuff.
Owl- thanks. Our bigger problem is not having a web connection.
January 20, 2010
Carl L. Marxer
Yes, I have the Sprint wireless broadband service with a Seirra Wireless Compass 597 modem. I have had it a year and a half, so there are probably newer modems. It works good. I hook it up to my Macbook pro and use the USB camera to stream to Stickam. Lately, I have been hooking up my Sony FX-1 camera to the Firewire, and streaming that as the source. The picture is relatively good with a good connection and then automatically goes to a smaller size when the connection is not as good. It works at the smaller size when signal is lower (30-40%). I have been doing this for AIGA and MCA-I meetings here in Atlanta. My stickam page is http://www.stickam.com/carlmarxer at the bottom are some videos we recorded at SCAD. It records for an hour, then you start it again. I notify all my friends that I am streaming with Twitter, which also posts to my Facebook account. The stickam chat works ok for questions, and I monitor Twitter and take @reply questions from there, too. I also embed the stickam feed in my personal webpage so people can see it there. No ads that way. (live video tab) I am hoping to be in NYC for your February meeting. Maybe we can try it out then. Just let me know.
January 25, 2010
Aharon Rabinowitz
Carl – that sounds great. Would love to give it a shot just to test connection speeds at the meeting location. Please come up to me at the start and we’ll give it a shot.
Thanks!
January 25, 2010