digitalbuilt

It’s tough when you are relying on 3rd party vendors to provide you connection for live streaming. When problems arise it’s often a game of phone tag to try to get a hold of someone who can actually fix the line. All the while your webcast might be down, or if you have the budget, running on a backup connection.
If you spend €100,000 for a connection, just for a few days, you expect it to work, even if it’s $100 you expect it to work.
Well recently at LeWeb their vendor Swisscom had a hard time “keeping the lights on”. According to Arrington (who was at the event):

Le Web, which paid €100,000 to Swisscom to ensure lightning fast Internet, had no Internet connectivity. Nothing for the audience, nothing for the stage, nothing in the press room. Ustream had 50% connectivity, and lost some great footage.

Ouch, I am shocked they had all their eggs in one (expensive) basket. Always aim for a backup connection, with that kind of budget it should have been a no brainer.
According to LOÏC LE MEUR BLOG When the Ustream connection was up they secured

a total of 31 175 unique visitors and a peak of 2235 live concurrent viewers. That is just impressive, we got about 20x more visitors outside of the room than the onsite participants, that is just fascinating.

I don’t think that’s too impressive.

Billabong has a couple events running concurrently, both offering a Windows Media Live Stream.  http://www.billabongpro.com/maui08/ @273k Their feed just went down though.

http://billabong.wetsand.com/ @203k They timeout the stream after 20mins.  Every camera has a different color setting, makes it a little disconcerting to watch.

Nothing too out of the box here.  Interesting that most surfcasts are still Windows Media.  Good commentary is carrying the slow heats with the Pipeline masters.

MyFox Milwaukee LIVE looks to be offering up a show a few times a week using http://www.mogulus.com/

A simple embed, Flash player, a little small perhaps.  Also using http://chatango.com to embedd a simple chat.  This all sits next to a Windows Media stream @ 320×240 273k of the local radar.

Watch it here: http://media.myfoxmilwaukee.com/live/index.html very basic, looks like they are just testing out the idea.  Like a behind the scenes as he does the weather.  In this case with a big snow storm coming on.

Flash on Mogulus 100 viewers.  Vey cool idea, esp. for weather geeks and during big weather events.

Venture Summit Silicon Valley Webcast.  

http://alwayson.goingon.com/page/display/30200

Single camera, some buffering.  just 43 watching.  Using the chat on the side that Kyte.com offers.

Using Kyte.com Flash

Without getting political, a search for upcoming webcasts is certainly finding plenty of things to watch.

http://www.realizingthepromise.org/webcast 12.04.08 Noon PST

I’ll watch a webcast of almost anything for the content and to measure their delivery.

Join Challenger Center for Space Science Education for a live interactive webcast, Wednesday, December 10th at 2:00pm ET with Dr. Barbara A. Cohen, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Dr. Cohen will take questions from participants and talk about lunar science and NASA’s Constellation Program that plans to send humans back to the Moon.   

http://www.challenger.org/ 12.10.08 @ 11AM PST

There is high resolution, and then there is the 200k “high resolution” windows media stream provided by http://roxy.wetsand.com/ .  

Stats: 203k 416×234 16:9 Windows Media 9.  Streamed by Akamai.

Because there needs to be a central place for all webcasting news and events.  I will be posting links to every webcast I find, and looking for insider knowledge on the technology behind them.