UK wide broadcast

Apart from church policy..
"Meetinghouse Webcast is intended to broadcast events from one building to other buildings. Allowing others to view the webcasts from locations other than Church buildings should be done only when unusual circumstances exist and stake and area leaders deem it appropriate."
If a general authority deemed it appropriate and wanted to broadcast for the whole of the uk to a portion of the church membership at home, would there be any physical limitations such as impact on church servers etc? Would the quality of service degrade as more members watched a church sanctioned broadcast?
I presume the church servers are robust enough to handle worldwide conference broadcasts, if that is the case can they handle a uk wide broadcast to as I said a portion of membership at home?
Btw policy is for the leaders, I am looking at techincal ability of equipment to handle such broadcasts if leaders required it.

stephen500 wrote:Apart from church policy..
"Meetinghouse Webcast is intended to broadcast events from one building to other buildings. Allowing others to view the webcasts from locations other than Church buildings should be done only when unusual circumstances exist and stake and area leaders deem it appropriate."
If a general authority deemed it appropriate and wanted to broadcast for the whole of the uk to a portion of the church membership at home, would there be any physical limitations such as impact on church servers etc? Would the quality of service degrade as more members watched a church sanctioned broadcast?
I presume the church servers are robust enough to handle worldwide conference broadcasts, if that is the case can they handle a uk wide broadcast to as I said a portion of membership at home?
Btw policy is for the leaders, I am looking at techincal ability of equipment to handle such broadcasts if leaders required it.

The answer to your question would depend upon HOW the broadcast were done. The satellite equipment is all serialized and SLC can control what group of receivers can receive a broadcast if it's done by satellite. This has been done before in the case of a temple dedication where only a select group of members is able to watch the broadcast in their stake centers.

I don't know of any way that a broadcast could be controlled in a member's home. On the other hand if a broadcast were done over the Internet then the church servers would be impacted. Control could be done by only providing the URL for the broadcast to a specific group, although this wouldn't be fool-proof.

techgy wrote:The answer to your question would depend upon HOW the broadcast were done. The satellite equipment is all serialized and SLC can control what group of receivers can receive a broadcast if it's done by satellite. This has been done before in the case of a temple dedication where only a select group of members is able to watch the broadcast in their stake centers.

I don't know of any way that a broadcast could be controlled in a member's home. On the other hand if a broadcast were done over the Internet then the church servers would be impacted. Control could be done by only providing the URL for the broadcast to a specific group, although this wouldn't be fool-proof.

Thanks for your reply.
The idea would be to provide a section of church membership to view the webcast at home using a url to watch on media player. This would be given out only to the section of church membership involved.
However my concern is that depending on the amount of members watching, could this impact to a bad extent the church servers and reduce the quality of the broadcast. Ie broadcasting chapel to chapel uses little resources, but if we were broadcasting via a url on windows media player to 100s of homes would it have a bad impact?

stephen500 wrote:Thanks for your reply.
The idea would be to provide a section of church membership to view the webcast at home using a url to watch on media player. This would be given out only to the section of church membership involved.
However my concern is that depending on the amount of members watching, could this impact to a bad extent the church servers and reduce the quality of the broadcast. Ie broadcasting chapel to chapel uses little resources, but if we were broadcasting via a url on windows media player to 100s of homes would it have a bad impact?

To provide a response in regards to what effect this would have on the church servers you would need a reply from someone at CHQ. I don't have that information. Perhaps someone at CHQ will respond.

techgy wrote:To provide a response in regards to what effect this would have on the church servers you would need a reply from someone at CHQ. I don't have that information. Perhaps someone at CHQ will respond.

If it happened it would be on week day evenings in the UK and Probally at most a 100 homes??, so the impact on other regions should be miminal.

stephen500 wrote:If it happened it would be on week day evenings in the UK and Probally at most a 100 homes??, so the impact on other regions should be miminal.

We have done this in similar circumstances to what you describe and it was quite successful. The advice I received from CHQ was that the webcast servers would allow for a max of 100 streams at a time. So you would want to be sure that any meetinghouses that need to be connected are connected to the stream well and truly before your households start connecting. As for quality, the receiving ends are only as good as their Internet connections. In our case we streamed out at 300kbps to allow for most of our home users to watch without constant buffering issues.

Hope this helps! Happy to chat privately if you want more detail on our experiences.

lionelwalters wrote:We have done this in similar circumstances to what you describe and it was quite successful. The advice I received from CHQ was that the webcast servers would allow for a max of 100 streams at a time. So you would want to be sure that any meetinghouses that need to be connected are connected to the stream well and truly before your households start connecting. As for quality, the receiving ends are only as good as their Internet connections. In our case we streamed out at 300kbps to allow for most of our home users to watch without constant buffering issues.

Hope this helps! Happy to chat privately if you want more detail on our experiences.

I am grateful for your help and may contact you in the future for more info.
Do you have a phone number that I can ring church hq tech department on behalf of an Area Seventy? Or do I just ring global services helpdesk?

I contacted global services and got a ticket number.

Just to let you know for info, that I contacted global services and first they advised that 250 streams appears to be the normal max.
I was asked by an Area Seventy to see if we can increase the streams so that broadcasts could reach more people. Global services have elevated my ticket to try and find out whether the streams can be increased.
If possible it appears that it may require a unique unit number to broadcast under.
The church must have general capacity has it broadcasts general conference worldwide. Hopefully it is just a matter of assigning a max amount of streams to a broadcast.

stephen500 wrote:Just to let you know for info, that I contacted global services and first they advised that 250 streams appears to be the normal max.
I was asked by an Area Seventy to see if we can increase the streams so that broadcasts could reach more people. Global services have elevated my ticket to try and find out whether the streams can be increased.
If possible it appears that it may require a unique unit number to broadcast under.

How good is you connection at the conference site? An easy solution (if you have the uplink bandwidth) would be to run 2 separate sessions (perhaps one for buildings and one for members?)

The church must have general capacity has it broadcasts general conference worldwide. Hopefully it is just a matter of assigning a max amount of streams to a broadcast.

I think that the church has two different systems. An in-house system (Meetinghouse Webcast) which is used for stake conferences or other such "small" meetings and an outsourced system (Move Networks/Akima) which is used for general conference.

Aaron Z

Stephen,

Let me help a little. The servers are currently set for a max to any one source stream of 250. Based on your earlier posts this would seem to be enough. For large events such as this i would recommend contacting the ICS Broadcast Event Support Team in Salt Lake City for either assistance or direction. The best way is what you have already done by contacting GSD and creating a ticket that will be escalated to the level 2 group who can put you in contact with this team. They should be in contact with you this week. When is your event?
Troy