Webcast???

[Arnie Schlissel]

Windows or Mac? Mac is iChat, windows is Webex: https://www.webex.com/

My girlfriend’s company uses Webex for training & conferencing. She’s in Brooklyn, the other people on line may be in Manilla, London or Mumbai.

Arnie
Now in post: Peristroika, a film by Slava Tsukerman
https://www.arniepix.com/blog

[David Roth weiss]

Thanks Arnie, I’ll look into it…

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Randy Wheeler]

TV stations are using this consumer device to send live feeds from
remote locations instead of expensive satellite truck feeds:

https://www.slingmedia.com/go/slingbox

CNET News.com’s Erica Ogg visits CBS 5 in San Francisco to see how
the newsroom is using a Slingbox to get live video feeds for
traffic, weather and breaking news instead of relying on standard
news vans using satellite signals.

https://www.news.com/1606-2_3-6182261.html

To run the Slingbox users will need:

– TV Source (antenna, cable, satellite, DVR, DVD, or video camera)
– Ethernet connection from your Slingbox to your (wired or wireless)
router via an ethernet cable, wireless adapter or powerline ethernet
bridge
– PC with Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP
– Broadband Internet Connection (required for remote use only)

If you want to watch television from a mobile device you will need:

– A network which can support download speeds of 112 Kbps
(recommended). EvDO or EDGE are both acceptable
– A high capacity or an unlimited data plan from your cellular or
mobile provider
– A Windows Mobile device, such as a cell phone or PDA

While the Slingplayer software which is needed to play television
comes free with the Slingbox, users will have to cough up an extra
$29.99 for Slingplayer Mobile.

https://www.geek.com/sling-media-slingbox-personal-video-broadcaster/

Randy

[Mark Suszko]

These web-based solutions all work to a greater or lesser extent, but they don’t all exactly stream in real time. What we have found from doing these a couple ways over the years is the stream-viewing audience falls farther and farther behind as the program goes on. When we do 2-hour teleconferences, the folks watching the stream experience a time delay that approaches six minutes by the end of the first hour. This means it is to all intents and purposes useless to try and do full-duplex conversations with multiple sites in real time, because the web folks are six minutes behind when the question first gets asked.

We use a Ku-band satellite transponder with a C-band turn-around in the bird to reach all our target downlink sites for teleconferences. We use an 800 number and an audio bridge with a mix-minus, so callers calling into the show to ask a question do not hear any echo from the satellite delay. That delay is a fraction of a second, and is fairly imperceptible, and never increases. While our callers are waiting on hold to ask their questions, they hear our program feed live, so they don’t miss anything, even if they are making the call outside of the room where they are watching the downlink, (which we encourage as the simplest way to avoid injecting feedback into the audio.) Typically we do not use a back-haul video of any callers from other sites, but it *is* possible to do that. We did it once or twice over the years, decided that was extra expense the audience didn’t really require, and so nowadays, we usually settle for throwing up a still graphic of the caller that was pre-produced, and running their audio under that during their calls, as they interact with the people in our studio. It feels about the same as when the nightly news does an interview with a field correspondent that’s reporting in by phone: you get a graphic with their picture and maybe a map to give a sense of where they are coming from, and throw some graphics up over that as needed.

Satellite is really not always as expensive as you might think, if you can get a fiber line to the teleport and skip needing a truck at the site. One of our clients once ran the numbers on how expensive it was to do training this way, with satellite transmission to downlink sites at libraries and community colleges around the state. What they discovered that on a per-person basis, the 2-hour shows cost less per individual than those folks were paying for their McDonald’s lunches at the downlink sites, with good interactivity in real time. And by using the network of community colleges as downlink sites, their drive distance to go see and participate was a maximum of about thirty minutes from home, no matter where they lived in the state. So it works well for our clients. We send a duplicate of the live output to the web for live streaming, for those places where they just can’t get away to a downlink site, but those viewers are generally passive and not calling in, due to the delay issue.

I do know that the visual quality is superior for our audiences when they go with a downlink as opposed to a stream as well. Your mileage definitely will vary on that depending on the specific software you deploy to stream out things like powerpoints and the like, as well as the bandwidth and other connectivity issues unique to your IT situations. What you decide to use will be a balancing act between costs, perceived value, level of quality, and how effective the project is.

[Brian Mccartney]

Hi David, you might try ON24 or Talkpoint communications. They both do topnotch webcasting in a variety of configurations. I am not sure how they would exactly handle your particular situation but they have professional services that will usually consult with the client on how to get them what they need.

I consult with a few larger corporations on doing this exact thing but usually internally and working with existing infrastructure and tools.

Good Luck!

[Peter Ralph]

do you want people all over the world to have access to the converstation in real time? That is webcasting – expensive and complex

or just 3 people talking and watchin each other? That is video conferencing – cheap and simple