Streaming Media West 2005 Wrap-Up Part 1

Planning and Executing Effective Webcasts
Moderator: Steve Mack, author of Streaming Media Bible; Panelists: Marc Angolia, production specialist, Air Line Pilots Association; Travis Petershagen, digital media solutions manager, Microsoft Studios; Patricia Reardon, senior manager, online event marketing, Cisco Systems; Mark Tarleton, strategic media development, Webcast operations, Raytheon

This session had solid panelists from corporate streaming entities such as Cisco, Raytheon, and Microsoft. Although my current work focuses on Podcasts and videoblogging, there is still a sizable and increasing population of customers who need to use live streaming. I'll share some of the new data points I got here:

1) These days, Microsoft and Cisco both outsource their streaming. This makes logical sense; many tech companies initially develop technologies and want to use their own products. But the effort of staging and coordinating live events and the associated project management is definitely out of the core competency of a software company.
2) Several presenters spoke highly of Vlog it!, the live video production product from Serious Magic. This, combined with the recommendation I got for their new video blogging product, is going to make me check them out carefully. The only ding they got was that their product, which works well with chromakeying (greenscreen), was not as easy to control when the actors/presenters went "off script" and changed pre-set timings.
3) In discussing encoding, the panelist from Microsoft said they preferred to use streaming encoders in "pull mode," meaning the encoder with the live feed is sitting on an external, non-firewall-blocked IP address, and the streaming server (taking all the hits) goes out and gets the stream from it. This is in contrast to "push" mode, where the encoder beams its stream through a firewall up to the streaming server, but if it is disconnected or the publishing point is changed, the encoder then has to be re-activated.
4) Each of the panelists uses different streaming bitrates. Microsoft has pretty much dropped 56k streams for its audience; another panelist still has modem viewers. Some don’t give viewers a choice but choose for them, depending on what they know that branch of the multicast network could successfully carry.
5) One panelist emphasized the need to work with IT departments to let them know about expected streaming traffic. A serious problem can arise when IT network protection code erroneously perceives an influx of viewers to a streaming server as a denial of service attack.
6) Multicast is still hard to get working, because of the many modes it offers and the need to set every switch in a network not only to enable multicast but to enable the right mode. And everyone recommended against variable-bitrate multicasting.
7) Most people still use an Osprey card to do live captures.8) Too many presenters give their PowerPoint slides to the live event planners at the last minute, and the slides often have tiny, unreadable text. This invariably causes the audience to complain "we can't read the text." No one had an answer for how to manage their "talent" so the PowerPoint would come on time. (Incidentally, I found it odd that people weren't using other solutions for synchronized delivery of the powerpoint along with the video broadcast, such as WebMeeting.)

Moderator Steve Mack gave each panelist an opportunity to recount their "worst Webcasting experience." One story from Microsoft described how a multicast network collapsed and the clients went unicast, fell back to the server, and crashed it. They talked to the help desk, stopped the show, restarted the show, and eventually got the system working again--but only after much embarrassment.

Another panelist said his organization did a test the night before an event at a hotel. The nighttime crew did a great job, but the daytime crew didn't know how to handle it, and the stream cut out multiple times. Hotels are a big problem, most of the panelists agreed; their general advice was to really test out the system, double check it, and be prepared for difficulty when using hotel networks.

The third anecdote was about a CEO broadcast to multiple continents, with a lot of clients trying to get to it. Long story short: Much of the audience couldn't get the stream, which was especially bad because the company's products were delivering those streams.

Probably the most interesting statistic I heard during the panel related to cost savings. Cisco, which uses streaming video extensively as a sales and marketing tool, explained that they lowered their costs from $135 a head for on-site sales events (sending a domain expert to a hotel to present to groups of people) to $7 a head for providing an extensive online video library for the same audience.

—Damien Stolarz