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Streaming a church service is an ideal way to reach a distant audience, and particularly good for family gatherings such as weddings and christenings of family’s who live abroad. In order to webcast from a church, the most viable set up is to have an ADSL line for the internet connection (ideally with a static IP address), a PC with Windows Media encoder installed on it, and a digital camera with firewire connector on a suitable tripod.
If you have a microphone connected to a public address system, then it is best to use an output from this for the audio signal as the sound quality will be a lot better.
You connect the camera to the PC using a firewire lead. Log on to the Internet with the ADSL connection and then start broadcasting using Windows Media Encoder.
The live stream of the church service is then pulled down to a distribution server, and when visitors to your website select a link to view the webcast of the church service, they connect to the distribution server. This way only one connection is made through the church’s ADSL line. Any more than that and the connection would become saturated and the signal would break up.
August 15th, 2005
It is sometimes useful to pre-record a video before streaming it as if it was a live webcast. Webcasting in this manner is somtimes called a Simulated Live Webcast.
There are several reasons that people use simulated live webcasts.
For example:
The audience is split over different time zones:
You can broadcast the same webcast several times in different time zones so that viewers do not have to watch at unsociable times!
The content is sensitive material.
Streaming Wizard has webcast surgical procedures for training purposes. It was important to broadcast at a specific time in the students course, but for obvious reasons, it would not be helpful if complications in the procedures lead to surgeons performing tasks which were not related to the course.
Product launches:
Sometimes it is important to pre-prepare a product launch so that everything runs smoothly, and the hiccups associated with live broadcasting do not occur. Using a simulated live stream, you can run through and even edit your video and then send it out as if it was live.
August 12th, 2005
Webcasting a conference often causes all sorts of problems because conference organizers do not know what to expect, primarily due to lack of experience webcasting.
The biggest obstacle is working out how many people are going to watch the webcast.
We are often told that there are tens of thousands of members of a professional body who could potentially watch the webcast, which naturally leads to a potentially massive cost, which in reality is way off the mark. In reality about 0.5% of the people who receive information about a webcast might tune in for a brief period of time, and certainly not 100% for every hour of the conference! So what should you be doing to make your conference webcast a success?
The questions that you should first be asking are:
How do you work out how big a conference venue to use?
For a professional body with 10,000 members it is unlikely that you will hold a conference in a 10,000 capacity auditorium. Normally you will request that delegates register in advance so that you know how many people to cater for. If a venue has been pre booked you may limit the number of people who can attend, or if you get an unexpected response you can sometimes change the venue to a larger or smaller facility as necessary.
There is no reason why you cannot do this for a webcast, and it is actually easier allowing people to register on-line.
By knowing how many people are registered for your webcast you can significantly reduce the cost of the webcast. It is like booking the “right sized room” as opposed to a “massive auditorium”.
How much are you going to charge?
Most people charge delegates for attending a conference, so why not charge for the webcast? The cost per head for running a reasonable sized webcast is currently in the region of £1 GBP per hr. Compared to attending a conference which may cost several hundred pounds a day this is insignificant and probably amounts to less than the catering costs! By charging for your webcast, users are forced to register, and by virtue of the users paying, you do not get an expensive bill. For a popular conference you could easily profit from it!
Why should people watch the webcast?
Like a conference, you have got to sell a webcast to delegates - they will not just turn up. You must promote the webcast, remind people when it is, who the speakers are, and what they are going to get out of watching. If people do not know when it is, or what is in it for them, there is no way they are going to “turn up” to watch it. Make sure you remind them again the day before!
Who will watch the webcast?
The most likely people who will watch a conference webcast are people who would like to go to the conference, but for some reason or other cannot make it:
People who are too far away:
Overseas delegates can save a significant amount of money and time by watching a webcast instead of attending in person. Remember that they are in a different time zone though, so it might be worth doing a simulated live webcast (that is playing a pre-recorded video as if it were live), or providing on-demand videos after the event.
People who have other commitments:
For people who have other commitments the day of the conference, providing on-demand videos for them to watch at a later date are very useful.
People who only want to watch specific parts of the conference:
Often conferences have multiple speakers talking about different topics. If there is only one speech that you want to listen to you may not want to go to a full days conference, but if you can watch that on a webcast it is much more appealing. Make sure that the conference schedule is clearly stated on your website next to the link to the webcast(s).
People who want to ask questions:
When you go to a conference, you are able to ask questions. Likewise when you watch a webcast this facility would be useful. It is easy to provide an email address of a speaker for viewers to contact and receive a reply later on, or if planned carefully with a moderator can be turned into a fully interactive webcast.
People who were at the conference:
If you provide an archive of the conference then attendees of the conference can r-watch any material that was highly relevant to them, and also pass this on to colleagues who would benefit from that material themselves.
These are just some of the questions to ask which will help you work out what to expect. The people who run successful conference webcasts are those who run successful conferences and proactively moved their strategy over to the web as opposed to making wild guesses and hoping that people will just turn up!
August 11th, 2005
m3u files are text files that contain a playlist of mp3 files. Media players such as Windows Media Player and Winamp create these files dynamically on a client computer to make a playlist of the mp3’s on your computer. It is possible however to play files from a remote server instead of your local server, by adding the full URL of the file.
For example:
A text file was created with the following contents
http://gandalf.streamingwizard.com/demo/adrenalinehillbilly.mp3
This was saved as playlist.m3u and uploaded to the webserver.
Clicking the link will open the m3u file, which will fire up the media player and start playing from the playlist.
With a little bit of scripting it is possible to create the m3u file dynamically so that you can program a radio station or create a random list.
M3u playlists are used for on-demand playback and not live streaming. If you want everyone to be listening to the same mp3 at the same time, then that needs to be set up server side and sent out as a broadcast using a .wvx file.
August 9th, 2005
There are two primary protocols for transmitting data over the Internet. TCP (transmission Control Protocol) and UDP (User Datagram Protocl). UDP is more suited to streaming because, unlike TCP is does not include error checking. This allows for a continuous stream of one-way data to be transmitted efficiently. Occasionally data packets will be lost although for streaming the odd packet lost is not very important.
Using these protocols, Real Networks pioneered RTSP, the Real Time Streaming Protocol in 1996. This has been used by Real Server, and it’s successor Helix Server as well as being adopted by Apple in producing it’s Quick Time Streaming Server and the open source Darwin Server. Both of these will use UDP by default, but can be configured to transfer over TCP.
Similarly Microsoft has created their own protocol and called it MMS (Microsoft Media Services). Again MMS will use UDP as the preferred transfer protocol, fail over to TCP where necessary and finally will attempt to transfer via http over TCP.
Streaming over http will work and is often the only way to stream through firewalls, although it is not ideal. HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) was created to transfer discreet pieces of data as opposed to a continuous stream. It can be used for small files, but is more prone to packet loss, and unable to cope with large numbers of concurrent streams.
August 8th, 2005
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