Feb 14th NW Broadcast

Using the Church Webcasting System, YouTube, etc. Including cameras and mixers.
gcwilliams2
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Feb 14th NW Broadcast

#1

Post by gcwilliams2 »

We broadcast our Stake Conference to 3 remote buildings. We have a satellite receiver at our Stake Center. We were able to receive the Salt Like content fine over the satellite system. We used the church internet broadcast system to send our local content to the remote building. about 45 minutes before we were to start, the webcaster portal completely failed. We had no view of the connections to the remote building. We were not able to even connect the remote buildings to the data stream.

We used an audio backup system to send the local content. The remotes were able to connect to either our broadcast or directly to the SLC URL at 30-40 minutes after the hour. From our point of view the Internet broadcast system is completely under powered and unable to carry the network traffic necessary to support such conferences. We would like to see this addressed before our next conference in April.

Geoff Williams
Vancouver East Stake
Technology Specialist
MCardoza
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Re: Feb 14th NW Broadcast

#2

Post by MCardoza »

Similar catastrophic failure.
We broadcast from our stake center receiving via satellite and everything worked fine until 9:50am pacific where our remote buildings encountered looping and buffering. This escalated by 10:10am to complete failure of streams and inability to even to connect to the lds webcast portal over browser. We were forced to triage in a similar fashion, the only difference was we fired up the old windows media meetinghouse webcaster by 11am. Needless to say, confidence in local church technology has taken a pretty big hit in our stake today, and I pray for inspired revelation on future bandwidth and cpu cycle capacity when all stakes within a region are encouraged to use the same broadcasting portal at the same time.

Matt Cardoza
Stake Clerk
Spokane Washington North Stake
russellhltn
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Re: Feb 14th NW Broadcast

#3

Post by russellhltn »

I guess I'm not surprised. The last big hit was on a regional conference. CHQ didn't anticipate so many stakes streaming the local portion. There really is no requirement to do so. So along comes a bi-regional conference....
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MCardoza
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Re: Feb 14th NW Broadcast

#4

Post by MCardoza »

Our Stake Tech Specialists (and judging by the load failure, those of other stakes as well) were advised by global support to stream the satellite feed to our Internet stream receiving meeting houses. They were advised this when they called to receive the regional broadcast url to provide to our non-satellite/internet only chapels.
russellhltn
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Re: Feb 14th NW Broadcast

#5

Post by russellhltn »

MCardoza wrote:Our Stake Tech Specialists (and judging by the load failure, those of other stakes as well) were advised by global support to stream the satellite feed to our Internet stream receiving meeting houses. They were advised this when they called to receive the regional broadcast url to provide to our non-satellite/internet only chapels.
That's funny. Because the "Stake Conference Broadcast Instructions for Stake Presidents" specifically said to use the private URL to stream from SLC and NOT to stream from one location to another.
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lajackson
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Re: Feb 14th NW Broadcast

#6

Post by lajackson »

russellhltn wrote:[T]he "Stake Conference Broadcast Instructions for Stake Presidents" specifically said to use the private URL to stream from SLC and NOT to stream from one location to another.
That works just fine for the portion of the stake conference that originates at Church headquarters.

This does not address the local portion of the stake conference that occurs during the first half hour, in which the stake president is expected to conduct the local portion of the stake conference, including the conducting of stake business and addressing the members of his stake.

If the Church is going to rely on the stake to provide a local portion of the stake conference, the local stake needs to be able to stream from the stake center to the other overflow meetinghouses in the stake to provide that portion of the conference.

Since this has happened twice now, I do not believe headquarters understands that a stake today in most cases is not able to put all of its members into the stake center in one location for a conference. They have forgotten that they no longer build meetinghouses large enough to house a complete stake, and they have forgotten that they have instructed stake presidents that meetinghouse-to-meetinghouse streaming is the Church-expected method to send a stake conference to the other buildings in the stake where members are attending the conference.

We fully expected that we would be able to stream our local half-hour portion of stake conference, and then switch to the URL from Church headquarters, as instructed, to stream the rest of the regional stake conference.

I do not believe headquarters realizes just how many stakes have to use meetinghouses that are not satellite capable for stake conference congregations. When everyone starts hitting the main URL for the regional portion of the conference and the servers are already tied up for the local portion, they dump the stake president.

It might not be a bad idea for the Church to survey the stakes participating in the next regional conference and find out just how many will need both a local meetinghouse-to-meetinghouse stream and the headquarters stream. They have been caught by surprise twice now. These conferences are too important to destroy because of lack of planning.

There is a link where the Church has asked us to complete a Broadcast Post Event Survey. I think it would be helpful if everyone involved in the regional conference (or any other broadcast or streaming event) would complete the survey as requested.
russellhltn
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Re: Feb 14th NW Broadcast

#7

Post by russellhltn »

lajackson wrote:That works just fine for the portion of the stake conference that originates at Church headquarters.

This does not address the local portion of the stake conference that occurs during the first half hour, in which the stake president is expected to conduct the local portion of the stake conference, including the conducting of stake business and addressing the members of his stake.
The instructions gave latitude for a councilor or assigned high councilor to preside and conduct in each location. It further stated that Prayers, hymns, speakers, musical number, etc should be provided in each location.

As such, it appears that streaming between locations would be going against the provided instructions.
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lajackson
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Re: Feb 14th NW Broadcast

#8

Post by lajackson »

russellhltn wrote:The instructions gave latitude for a councilor or assigned high councilor to preside and conduct in each location. It further stated that Prayers, hymns, speakers, musical number, etc should be provided in each location.
Those are not the instructions I received. But if those are the correct instructions, (and I have reason to believe that they are), I would agree that we need to round up a bunch of choirs and deploy counselors and high councilors to run individual meetings during the first 30 minutes before the broadcast.

And in that case, local streaming would not be needed on regional stake conference Sunday. Meetinghouses without satellite equipment would just use the URL from Church headquarters.
jakerose
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Re: Feb 14th NW Broadcast

#9

Post by jakerose »

Of note, when talking to the GSC the engineering team had spun down a significant portion of the servers for the weekend, totally underestimating the weekend demand. Once enough people called in and indicated an issue, the GSC called the engineering team who spun servers up and got the system up to where it needed to be. Of course, this was an hour into the conference.

We had stake conference last week and the system was awesome. The regional yesterday was....brutal.
russellhltn
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Re: Feb 14th NW Broadcast

#10

Post by russellhltn »

jakerose wrote:Of note, when talking to the GSC the engineering team had spun down a significant portion of the servers for the weekend, totally underestimating the weekend demand. Once enough people called in and indicated an issue, the GSC called the engineering team who spun servers up and got the system up to where it needed to be.
I wonder how many stakes booked the event at least a week in advance as advised by Schedule an event. If a large number of stakes scheduled after the engineers looked at the expected load, that could create a major problem.

I don't know how much latitude the church has in spinning up more servers on short notice. I can see where someone might decide to discourage local streaming for regional conferences but allow it for stake conferences. It would minimize the peak demand. In the case of a regional conference, the difference in talks between the two methods would be just the short local talk.
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