MrJangles
- Thread Author
- #1
Occasionally at work someone will ask me a random web idea to see if it's possible. I didn't know what I was getting myself into when I said it's possible to live stream internal events to our company, on our network, across Canada. I work for a broadcast company and every so often our president will speak to the masses. Before, he would pre-record video and watch it later online. We've been doing this new way now for the past 3 years.
We gather in the atrium of our building, a massive opening that holds about 1000 people. 3 cameras, each worth more than my car (just the lens), 4 stand mic's and 1 walk around mic, record as the ceo, pres of tv, and pres of radio speek. Our offices around Canada connected in through their PC and could send in questions. Questions were sent to the moderator with an ipad. A team of about 5 people managed communications from the local markets as well as moderated questions as they came in.
Another team manages the live recording, 3 cameramen, 1 switcher, 1 director, 1 audio guy. I'm on my own in another studio, this time the cosmotv one, managing the webcast and switching overlays. My choices for tables were slim, so I picked a sexy stainless steel one beside the bed for my other keyboard and mouse.
Some are probably wondering why I'm using windows for live streaming, where flash is the big winner in this field. The explanation is that our WAN has bottlenecks, and pulling a feed to local servers on the WAN fixes that. Why not use flash on the local servers? Costs for licensing. For security reasons we have to do this on our network. How do our mac's in the company see the windows stream? They don't, I feed a flash stream as well, and our mac's luckily aren't in a bottleneck. When the user goes to the website to watch the stream, their IP is matched to their location and they're given the closest feed. The browser is detected and they're given windows or flash. The site's coded in .net C#, and I use 12 windows media servers across Canada, 4 balanced in Toronto, and 1 flash server in Toronto to make it all come down.
Technology is fun...
We gather in the atrium of our building, a massive opening that holds about 1000 people. 3 cameras, each worth more than my car (just the lens), 4 stand mic's and 1 walk around mic, record as the ceo, pres of tv, and pres of radio speek. Our offices around Canada connected in through their PC and could send in questions. Questions were sent to the moderator with an ipad. A team of about 5 people managed communications from the local markets as well as moderated questions as they came in.
Another team manages the live recording, 3 cameramen, 1 switcher, 1 director, 1 audio guy. I'm on my own in another studio, this time the cosmotv one, managing the webcast and switching overlays. My choices for tables were slim, so I picked a sexy stainless steel one beside the bed for my other keyboard and mouse.
Some are probably wondering why I'm using windows for live streaming, where flash is the big winner in this field. The explanation is that our WAN has bottlenecks, and pulling a feed to local servers on the WAN fixes that. Why not use flash on the local servers? Costs for licensing. For security reasons we have to do this on our network. How do our mac's in the company see the windows stream? They don't, I feed a flash stream as well, and our mac's luckily aren't in a bottleneck. When the user goes to the website to watch the stream, their IP is matched to their location and they're given the closest feed. The browser is detected and they're given windows or flash. The site's coded in .net C#, and I use 12 windows media servers across Canada, 4 balanced in Toronto, and 1 flash server in Toronto to make it all come down.
Technology is fun...
