streaming versus two-way conferencing

The problem we are focused on with the current building-to-building effort is to allow site-to-multisite one-way streams. Yesterday someone voiced a strong opinion that we instead should be providing multisite-to-multisite two-way interactive communications (video conferencing) - allowing speakers to be in each of the participating buildings. The tradeoff involves some quality (smaller buffers due to real-time constraints) and perhaps some reliability (due to the added complexity). I'm interested in your opinions/views wrt this tradeoff. How important is it to have multiple source locations?

I personally find it distracting if the video is not smooth or is grainy. I then tend to lean towards having audio only.

Tom

Two-way streaming is nice, but not necessary at this time. The critical aspect is to be able to send from the stake center to a distant ward building during stake conferences, not necessarily the other way around.

What's the application? I've heard of stakes in the US that are hundreds of miles across. Being able to hold leadership meetings in different buildings connected together would greatly help the HC and other leaders by reducing the amount of time spent on the road going to/from their regular meetings.

Obviously, the quality settings for such an application are going to be different then for a stake conference where it's one-way.

RussellHltn wrote:What's the application?

The application we are focused on is stake meetings - both in stakes where the members can't fit in a single building and in stakes where travel makes it difficult for all members to gather to a single location. As a general rule, the number of participants in an event influences the need for interactivity. If only a few people are involved the need for interactivity is high - if several thousand are involved then the only way to manage the event is to make it non-interactive. For stake conferences there are enough participants that the venue doesn't need to be interactive, but the specific question we are talking about here is even if the event isn't going to be interactive, do we need to support speakers from each participating building? This could be useful if the core problem is travel and not capacity - in such situations the speakers may experience the same travel hardship the general membership does. On the flip side - forcing a few speakers to travel an hour or two is different than asking a few hundred members to do the same.

For the smaller stake events, like a high council meeting, where interactivity is important we need to remember there are more simple solutions that may meet the need (audio conferencing comes to mind.)

pwhiting wrote:For stake conferences there are enough participants that the venue doesn't need to be interactive, but the specific question we are talking about here is even if the event isn't going to be interactive, do we need to support speakers from each participating building? This could be useful if the core problem is travel and not capacity - in such situations the speakers may experience the same travel hardship the general membership does. On the flip side - forcing a few speakers to travel an hour or two is different than asking a few hundred members to do the same.

Well, let's think about the complexity of allowing this kind of "interactivity". (Not really interactive, but allowing the changing of where the speaker is located.): I would expect that at the two sites that are changing roles, the audio/video feed would need to be changed between "remote" to "local" as the audio/video delay introduced at the live site would be unacceptable if the screen and sound system were still being fed by the broadcast system. In fact, the delay could make the handoff itself a bit awkward - how much time is buffered in the digital system? One second or ten? Plus there may be lighting changes needed as the sites change from live speaker with TV camera lighting to a video screen.

If you're running a direct stream, the other sites that are not changing roles would need to change their "source". -OR- both sites would be sending the video and someone at a head-end reflector would be doing the switching (sounds like a paid employee). Keep in mind this needs to be a system simple enough to allow others to duplicate and for replacement geeks to be found among the membership as the experienced geeks move on in life or callings.

All in all, it sounds like a lot of things to have happen and it's leaving a big opening for Murphy to make a cameo appearance. So in my opinion, it would be best to stick to a non-interactive format. If it's really a problem for the speakers, they can pre-tape their talks. Having the broadcast site change from camera to VCR is a lot simpler the the stuff I described above.

For HC meetings get a decent speakerphone and network the old fashioned way with AT&T.

Someone mentioned wanting something for rather small, interactive meetings. Here's what the Utah Valley PAF User's Group board did when two of their board members could not attend the meeting earlier this month or late last. It's an odd workaround, but it worked in this case.

Thanks to Renee Zamora for the information on what was done. This was in her genealogy blog.

"I wasn't able to make it to the meeting again this month so I attended remotely by Skype. There were two other board members that attended by Skype too. I felt like I took better notes being able to hear the board members at the meeting and also the comments from those on Skype. To bad I don't have a laptop to sign into Skype while at the meeting. We also had two other board members not at the meeting that talked to us over the phone. One member at the meeting used his cell phone and put it on speaker phone so everyone could hear. Even though I was on Skype I could hear the member over the speaker phone with no problem. It is just amazing what technology can do for us."

What are the assumptions regarding infrastructure available to solve this problem? Current infrastructure I'm aware of at stake and ward buildings are:
- voice line(s)
- satellite downlink (dish & receiver)
- Is there assumed budget for anything else?
It seems to me that without some additional equipment/infrastructure that there are some limits to what can be done to solve this beyond a phone conference as discussed earlier in the blog. If there were a reasonably sized internet connection (T1 upload speeds) then a gateway to the church's satelilte broadcast system could be set up so the satellite receive dish could be used at the remote buildings for one-way meeting sharing. The same could be done with a high-speed internet connection at both ends and leave the satellite system out of it, but the budget costs start to mount then. The satellite bandwidth is already "sunk" and is not used that heavily. Also I agree with earlier posts that interactive sessions between buildings are not that practical for large meetings such as stake conference. However, if there were a practical need that justfied the effort video conferencing systems available now will allow for participation from multiple locations without requiring a human at the switch, but you do have to purchase switching equipment to conduct these sessions. It would be expensive for the budget of a single stake but centrally operated at the church and fed through the satellite bandwidth as the outbound link to the participating buildings so each unit had only the last mile cost of their internet connection it would not be that bad. However, it would probably be more reasonable to just have the stake use an internet link to a gateway on the church's satellite system, book a 1.5 Mb slice of bandwidth for their conference and keep the conference on a one-way link for now would be far more affordable and save a lot of travel.

Is it possible to start a thread on some suggestions I have for how to improve things for general conference distribution? Or is it best to post those to this thread?

jfabiano wrote:What are the assumptions regarding infrastructure available to solve this problem? Current infrastructure I'm aware of at stake and ward buildings are:
- voice line(s)
- satellite downlink (dish & receiver)
- Is there assumed budget for anything else?

In most of of Utah Stake Centers there is a DSL connection that goes to the Family History Center in the building.

jfabiano wrote: Is it possible to start a thread on some suggestions I have for how to improve things for general conference distribution? Or is it best to post those to this thread?

Start another Thread, different topic, different thread.

Okay, do we know the characteristics of the DSL lines at the stake centers? Most DSL implementations are not symmetrical, ie different upload bandwidth vs. download. With a DSL connection available already the problem may be simplified somewhat. An MPEG4 or h.264 encoder can render compressed video stream that is usable for a large projection at about 1 Mb. Not that many DSL implementations have that much upload bandwidth but with the answer on the size of these lines we'll know for sure whether upload via the existing DSL is practical.
It was also mentioned earlier that people aren't that attracted to a solution with grainy video and they are right, poor video quality links often reduce the likelihood that the system will be listened to again. So implementing something that is compressed any lower than 1 Mb is probably not a good use of church resources. Given that, for a large multi-site meeting where there would be contributors or speakers present at multiple sites may be impractical with the current infrastructure list, we'll have to see once we get a few more answers.
The downlink side of that same DSL line is likely to be more capacious and could easily be in the 2-4 Mb/s range. Do we know who the carrier for these lines is? I'd assume that they are all purchased through some centralized deal so that a good price is obtained for the services. Some of the carriers have IGMP v.3 multicast enabled in their core and edge routers which would enable multicast of content via the DSL lines. Others don't have this available at all and multisite flows are treated as unicasts requiring more bandwidth at the origin server.
It still feels that the satellite interconnection system will need to be involved in this to have a good professional quality projection-size display at the receive sites. Does anyone know what the characteristics at the uplink site are? How much bandwidth is there in total? There are probably several compressed streams across a larger chunk of transponder bandwidth. Do we know of these are individually modulated and fed in SCPC fashion or if they are aggregated into a larger stream with a stat mux in MCPC mode? These questions would tell us what it would take in the way of equipment to feed a stream from a stake center out through the satellite system. Also what video compression formats are supported by the satellite recevers? My understanding is that the satellite receivers are from Wegener Corp but I don't know the model # to be able to look up the features available on the receive end. Does anyone know that info (or are they all different models)?
Sorry to ask so many questions but with a few answers we may be able to outline a practical implementation for at least one of these meeting scenarios, if not more.

jfabiano wrote:Okay, do we know the characteristics of the DSL lines at the stake centers? Most DSL implementations are not symmetrical, ie different upload bandwidth vs. download. With a DSL connection available already the problem may be simplified somewhat.

You are right in that they are not semetrical, the one I refered to in my previous post has a 728Kb/s upload.

jfabiano wrote: An MPEG4 or h.264 encoder can render compressed video stream that is usable for a large projection at about 1 Mb. Not that many DSL implementations have that much upload bandwidth but with the answer on the size of these lines we'll know for sure whether upload via the existing DSL is practical.

As for Windows Media Encoder we got a video stream that was 600Kb/s

jfabiano wrote: It was also mentioned earlier that people aren't that attracted to a solution with grainy video and they are right, poor video quality links often reduce the likelihood that the system will be listened to again. So implementing something that is compressed any lower than 1 Mb is probably not a good use of church resources.

We had a great picture at 600Kb, although only one building would be able to connect, otherwise you get buffer underrun and the picture is jerky. Although in the last Conference this was solved by having a server that you uploaded to and then everyone connected to that server for download. (We only had two sites at the last conference.)

jfabiano wrote: Given that, for a large multi-site meeting where there would be contributors or speakers present at multiple sites may be impractical with the current infrastructure list, we'll have to see once we get a few more answers.
The downlink side of that same DSL line is likely to be more capacious and could easily be in the 2-4 Mb/s range. Do we know who the carrier for these lines is? I'd assume that they are all purchased through some centralized deal so that a good price is obtained for the services. Some of the carriers have IGMP v.3 multicast enabled in their core and edge routers which would enable multicast of content via the DSL lines. Others don't have this available at all and multisite flows are treated as unicasts requiring more bandwidth at the origin server.

The carrier has to be local, for WA it is verizon since Qwest has no presence there, but I think for Utah they are linked through Quest, please correct me if I am wrong.

jfabiano wrote: It still feels that the satellite interconnection system will need to be involved in this to have a good professional quality projection-size display at the receive sites.

From what our emperical results have been you don't need to use the satilite system. Also this would require installing transmission stations at each stake building, not very cheap.

jfabiano wrote: Also what video compression formats are supported by the satellite recevers? My understanding is that the satellite receivers are from Wegener Corp but I don't know the model # to be able to look up the features available on the receive end. Does anyone know that info (or are they all different models)?

Sorry don't know the model but they use MPEG-2 encoding and decoding.

jfabiano wrote: Sorry to ask so many questions but with a few answers we may be able to outline a practical implementation for at least one of these meeting scenarios, if not more.

Ideas are the source of inginutity, continue to give them and ask more questions.

pwhiting wrote:The problem we are focused on with the current building-to-building effort is to allow site-to-multisite one-way streams.

This would be ideal for our Stake. Some of our members drive over three hours to the Stake Center. We also have outgrown the capacity of the Stake Center.

What is available from the Church now? Who do we call? What will they provide?

Thanks!

Currently there is no position from the church what is available, there have been many different solutions posted from many stakes, but it depends mostly on what you have available to your stake, budget wise and tech wise.

thedqs wrote:Currently there is no position from the church what is available, there have been many different solutions posted from many stakes, but it depends mostly on what you have available to your stake, budget wise and tech wise.

Thanks. We'll have to go without then...

If your stake center has a Family History Center that has a DSL connection you could do what I mentioned in this post /forum/showthread.php?p=314#post314 (it is also the cheapest) but as I mentioned it depends on what resources your stake already has.

This is my personal opinion. It is also the one I am most familiar with.

Thanks again! I'm going to take this to SPEC and see if we have anybody with any know-how! I really appreciate the help. Can we hire you? :0)

pwhiting wrote:The problem we are focused on with the current building-to-building effort is to allow site-to-multisite one-way streams. Yesterday someone voiced a strong opinion that we instead should be providing multisite-to-multisite two-way interactive communications (video conferencing) - allowing speakers to be in each of the participating buildings. The tradeoff involves some quality (smaller buffers due to real-time constraints) and perhaps some reliability (due to the added complexity). I'm interested in your opinions/views wrt this tradeoff. How important is it to have multiple source locations?

Our stake needs are facility capacity ... one way is all that we need.

KB

Has internet reliability been considered here? While in general, outages should be few and far between, they do happen, and with more regularity than other types of traditional media. Peering issues also crop up between networks to cause issues and I'm not sure it's a safe assumption that an entire stake will all use the same provider (my stake includes parts of 3 states with no universal cable provider or ILEC).

Now if the meeting involved is one that can live with this possibility, no big deal. If however, it can't, the only possibility that comes to mind off the top of my head is to use one or more prerecorded streams (and since they're prerecorded, limits on upload bandwidth aren't as big of an issue) sent over the internet to be spliced together (if needed) for either a satellite feed or a scheduled internet download prior to the event.

While going with a prerecorded approach isn't quite as nice as a live approach, it does simplify a whole host of technical issues. For a Stake conference, I can see a prerecorded approach being acceptable (correct me if I've missed something).

gblack wrote:Has internet reliability been considered here?

Yes - when we get to the point of recommending a solution it will be coupled with a strong recommendation to set up and test an audio backup that uses the PTSN.

gblack wrote:Has internet reliability been considered here?

Yes it has.

gblack wrote: While in general, outages should be few and far between, they do happen, and with more regularity than other types of traditional media. Peering issues also crop up between networks to cause issues and I'm not sure it's a safe assumption that an entire stake will all use the same provider (my stake includes parts of 3 states with no universal cable provider or ILEC).

The nice thing about many of these solutions is that they do not need to be on the same provider. You just need a spot that uploads the media and another spot to download the media.

gblack wrote:While going with a prerecorded approach isn't quite as nice as a live approach, it does simplify a whole host of technical issues. For a Stake conference, I can see a prerecorded approach being acceptable (correct me if I've missed something).

The only problem with Stake Conference is that, according to my dad who is the stake tech specialist, the church handbook says that Stake Conference cannot be recorded to media. Transmitted to another building is ok though, just not recorded.

thedqs wrote:
The nice thing about many of these solutions is that they do not need to be on the same provider. You just need a spot that uploads the media and another spot to download the media.

Sometimes that doesn't work as well as it might seem, particularly if the solution requires some sort of QoS. A good example would be an experience I had working for an ISP a few years back. The ISP wanted to outsource it's news service and chose a good provider to do so. However, despite the quality of the provider they chose, the service was unusable for the most part by the ISP's customers. Troubleshooting the issue, the cause turned out to be poor network performance (head-of-line blocking issue with some GigE routers up at MAE-EAST) BETWEEN the networks used by the ISP and the news provider. Both the ISP and the news provider were using good solid backbones at the time (sprintlink in the case of the ISP, I don't recall who the news provider was using now) but despite the quality of those two backbones, peering in this case wasn't done through a private peering arrangement but through MAE-EAST which was run by MCI Worldcom. MCI Worldcom while acknowledging the problem, had no real stake in solving it as they were neither a provider of the ISP or the news provider and didn't have any direct accountability in the issue. The end result was that the ISP had no choice but to drop the news provider.

Cases like this one are the exception instead of the rule, but they do exist. Obviously performance problems can be found when everyone is on the same provider if the provider hasn't properly designed their network or planned for growth, but the chances for such issues increase as you get more providers involved. Problems between providers can easily end up with much longer resolutions times, and quite often there is no formal effort to resolve such issues and they end up being resolved over the course of months or years due to the natural growth/expansion of the involved networks.

As you said, that is more of the exception then the rule, but I do understand where you can get a problem, as with any type of equipment. The only advantage that the internet has over say sat transmission is that it is potentially free. The cost for the church to install sat transmitters at each stake building would be prohibitive, and then as the stake size decreases you lose the need (except for overflow possibly).

Again for meetings where it cannot be pre-recorded (stake conference, stake leadership meeting, ward meetings, etc.) a live feed (sat, internet, etc) or audio over the phone are the two solutions that I can see (again I ask that if anyone has another idea to contribute) otherwise they'll just have to get to the building or get someone's meeting notes.

For meetings that can be pre-recorded (General Conference, Broadcasts from SLC, Christmas Pageant (Video recording cannot be in the chapel), Relief Society meeting (again no video in the chapel), etc) my old stake would record them on DVD and then send them out to each ward building's library, since that is the most reliable.

It just depends on what you want to accomplish, what you need to do, and what resources you have.

thedqs wrote:For meetings that can be pre-recorded (General Conference, Broadcasts from SLC, Christmas Pageant (Video recording cannot be in the chapel), Relief Society meeting (again no video in the chapel),

What are you saying here? As far as I know the only video broadcast/recording that can't be shown in the chapel is BYU Football.

gblack wrote:Sometimes that doesn't work as well as it might seem,

One thing I've read about is capping. Everything might start off well, but somewhere in the 2-2.5 hours the ISP may decide you've done enough and start limiting the bandwidth.

RussellHltn wrote:What are you saying here? As far as I know the only video broadcast/recording that can't be shown in the chapel is BYU Football.

Sorry that I wasn't clear. According to policy which the Stake Tech Specialist refered me to, you cannot video RECORD in the chapel.

So say there is a speaker, you cannot record them at the pulpit.

thedqs wrote:So say there is a speaker, you cannot record them at the pulpit.

OK, I remember reading something like that past. Might be worth checking the current manual to see if it's still there in the same form.

thedqs wrote:According to policy which the Stake Tech Specialist refered me to, you cannot video RECORD in the chapel.

After thinking about it, the manual in question is a policy manual. Not a list of commandments. I would take the recording option (along with the others) and pass it to the stake leaders along with the note on policy. It's their call. Presumably they will check with a higher authority for permission. (I'll leave definition of "higher authority" to them. ) Our call as Techs is to support our leaders, not play legal eagle or the enforcement division. As long as we point out the issues, we've done what's expected of us.

Now, all that said, in my experience, tape delay tends to be a less satisfying spiritual experience then "live", so the quest continues.

There is existing Technology in place to handle this already, if the Stake Center has decent bandwidth and you're looking for an easy solution. Just have a member bring their laptop and use one of the various Instant Messaging tools, these offer Audio and Video messaging.

The problem with instant messaging is that the quality is very poor. Though the solution of using the internet has been post as I mentioned earlier in this thread.

Ah, yes I see my mistake, I was pulled away for some work related matter and didn't finish reading the entire posting in this forum.

Thanks