Dropped Broadcast

During our stake conference broadcast yesterday, we lost the complete return feed at all three buildings several times during the broadcast. All three buildings dropped at the same time every time, yet to our knowledge, there were no problems with the feed from the stake center to the Church servers.

Were there server problems Sunday? Most of the drops occurred between 10:00 and 10:30 am Central Time.

What should we look at to troubleshoot this problem? Was our broadcast not actually getting to the Church servers for some reason?

Or is it simply that the Internet behaves differently on Sunday than it does on any other day of the week? We do not seem to have these problems when we test.

Thanks for any hints or suggestions. We are using Church software on laptops and feeding the Church server.

lajackson wrote:Or is it simply that the Internet behaves differently on Sunday than it does on any other day of the week?

I assume you disabled all the APs. Was there a NFL game or NASCAR race going on? The ISP could be affected by a upsurge in use by other customers.

russellhltn wrote:

lajackson wrote:Or is it simply that the Internet behaves differently on Sunday than it does on any other day of the week?

I assume you disabled all the APs. Was there a NFL game or NASCAR race going on? The ISP could be affected by a upsurge in use by other customers.

WiFi was off in all locations. I don't think there was NFL or NASCAR on Sunday morning. Those things start later in the day.

The real question is, the drops were in three separate cities, but they all happened at the same time. I would think that tends to point to the originating location. Is that correct?

And it appears the upload was working properly. Could there have been a problem on the originating end here without us knowing it? The only other common link appears to be the servers in Salt Lake.

This is really getting old. We think we are doing everything right, but there has been a big glitch every time. We have not yet staged a broadcast that meets even our minimum expectations.

lajackson wrote:The real question is, the drops were in three separate cities, but they all happened at the same time. I would think that tends to point to the originating location. Is that correct?

The encoding, upstream or the servers. Hard to tell which. You could lower the quality just to make sure you have enough overhead to send it.

I've always found in my 30ish attempts at broadcasts that uploading at anything other than the lowest setting is ALWAYS going to fail. I've only been involved with 2 failures, our first attempt and the webcast communicator overheated and rebooted, and the 2nd was another stake broadcasting multi-stake, and that week had new internet installed and decided to upload at 2MB - when nearly 80% of receiving sites in our area could never even download at that speed.

My Stake Center where I've done my uploads is a 1.54Mb down and 360Kbps ish upload and I've been successful every time.

BTW, take heart, the new solution from the Church that they presented on at the LDSTech conference last week was based on a variable output speed that is not locked to the upload speed anymore. So you can upload at any speed and a site can download at whatever speed it can and adjust on-the-fly.

russellhltn wrote:The encoding, upstream or the servers. Hard to tell which. You could lower the quality just to make sure you have enough overhead to send it.

You can't go any lower than the bottom rung. But the bottom rung does not handle movement at all, so we have always tried to go to the next lower setting. Every site has at least 4x the bandwidth to handle it.

johnshaw wrote:My Stake Center where I've done my uploads is a 1.54Mb down and 360Kbps ish upload and I've been successful every time.

BTW, take heart, the new solution from the Church that they presented on at the LDSTech conference last week was based on a variable output speed that is not locked to the upload speed anymore. So you can upload at any speed and a site can download at whatever speed it can and adjust on-the-fly.

We have 6Mb down and 2Mb up at all locations. And on a good day, we even speed test at that range, except for the Church servers. I am looking forward to the new solution. If it works, it will be an improvement.

This happened to us this past Sunday (10/26), the first live failure I've had since I started 4 years ago. The feed at both locations froze simultaneously; a restart on the receiving ends didn't help. We use the webcast box, and were sending at 500 kbps. There was no error on the sending side. I called support but they were not helpful at all, so I restarted the webcast and that did the trick.

I've often had failures Saturday nights during testing -- perhaps due to neighbors streaming movies -- but I get an error on the sending side. This seems like a problem at the Church's end.