Wow! It’s amazing. I was given a new project. The VP of Operations came up to me and told me he wants to webcast a presentation live to over 1000 of our Trade Partners where I work. I’m said “Sure. We can do that.” Then I hung up the phone and started my research.

Boy, I had no clue what I got myself into. It’s a pretty complicated thing to do (with less then 5 weeks to do it in with NAB in the middle of it!).

Anyhow. I started my research on Google, of course! I love Google…Anyhow…Keep your focus Marcelo. So I started with Akamai to see what they have to offer.

They in turn put me in charge with 2 of their partner companies. Multicast and OnStream Media. I spoke with Multicast and the guy there (Chuck I think was his name) really helped me get educated on this process. Here is a short breakdown of what it takes to webcast:

#1 - Production - You need to set up your production, including cameras, lighting, sound, live switcher, audio mixer, monitors, headset distribution (to talk to your camera operators as you are editing live), tape recorder (for the DV output), Hard Drive recorder (if you want to go straight to hard drive instead of tape) and waveform/vectorscope monitors to monitor the output (also called the program feed). You then take that program feed and send it to the encoder.

#2 - Encoding - You grap the output of your line (via Firewire) by capturing it into a capture software, converting it to a video format (.avi or .mov) and then have the encoder (in our case we are thinking of going with Windows Media encoder) encode the file. You have to configure the encoder with a public IP address which then the CDN (Content Distribution Network Provider) comes in and pulls the data from your machine (or as someone else explained to me, you can also set it up where you push it to them).

#3 - Distribution - Once your video is encoded, you either push it to a place that your CDN provided for you (like an FTP account) or they come and get it from your machine. Once that is done, they give you a URL for your feed where it will appear (e.g. http://someurl/feed/test.asf)

#4- Publishing - You create a webpage with a video player and any other functionality you want in it. You host that in your own network, but point the feed to the URL that they provided (above in #3). You send your URL where that webpage is to your users, however, the video feed would come from your host provider (above in #3).

So what’s important to understand here is the following:

#1 - You need production capabilities (e.g. equipment and people)
#2 - You need to encode everything
#3 - You need a network connection to your host provider to give them the encoded video. (Make sure it stays up or you lost connectivity to your CDN, which means, all your users won’t see your webcast).
#4 - They (CDN) provide the actual feed to all of your users (in our case 1000 users).

CDNs seem to charge by bandwidth usage. So in our case, we calculated that for 1000 users for 1 hour at 300KBPS (kilobits per second), the bandwidth usage would be approximately 135GB. Providers consider that a small account (they speak in terms of TeraBytes bandwith usage and here I thought we were big!), anyhow. For us they recommended a $300 per month account with a 1 year commitment.

That does not sound too bad considering we can use that account to host many live events and even “on demand” videos (which are videos that have been pre-recorded and people just watch them later).

Our other alternatives are to go ahead and purchase all the equipment we need (which I’m seriously considering) and have it all done in house. The only issue is that I have only 4 weeks to get everything, learn everything and make it work. Oy vey!

I did some further research and found that there are “mobile editing system integrators” out there that provide turn key solutions. One that I found (and he was very very friendly) was Mobile Studios (mobilestudios.com). They offer a complete turn-key solution for $25K which includes a live switch (the DataVideo SE800DV), 4 monitors + a program monitor, DV rack for recording the program to hard drive, an 8 XLR audio mixer, headset distribution amp and a video encoder (the Windows Media). All of it pre-configured in a box that is easy to carry around from place to place. Truly turnkey.

All you have to do is provide the cameras, microphones, laptop for presentation and host to stream the final output to them.

Everything else is provided. (I think the extras, like cables for hooking up the mics, cameras and the headsets for the camera operators are extra though).

Oh yeah, before I forget, if you plan as adding a laptop with a Power Point presentation on it as one of the sources you need to record, then you need to conver that output to DV output. There are 2 ways to do this:

#1 - Plug in a hardware in your VGA output of your laptop that converts the computer signal from VGA to either composite and/or s-video.

#2 - Use a software to capture whatever is on your screen and output it via Firewire (seems like the less costly of both options)

So the question is outsource or pay a bit more and purchase for future use (and reuse)?

Not sure. It depends on what my VPs come up with, but in the mean time, I’m loving learning all about this.
I love technology!

Cheers!

Marcelo Lewin

The Digital Media Dude