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Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik
I believe any regional is available for webcasting under the current system. NASA just needs people on the ground at the regional to set up (and possibly provide) the streaming computer, polycom unit, etc.
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Have you spoken to someone from NASA about this? It wasn't clear to me if the reason they don't do more regionals is only because they need manpower to cover them (which they do, of course) or if it's also a case of them not being able to handle the bandwidth needs of multiple regionals on the same weekend.
For reference, when I helped out with some of the regionals this year I used a 2.8GHz P4 along with the
Osprey 210 capture card and Helix Producer to do the encoding and feeding to the NASA server. This was all my own equipment - I doubt that the NASA people would have much spare equipment to lend out but I may be wrong.
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Originally Posted by Stephen Kowski
So do you have any idea what is specifically needed (not neccessarily wanted) in terms of bandwidth?
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You can get a pretty good estimate by using the bitrate of the stream that is encoded. I was running at 150kbps, so it's easy to figure out what bandwidth you'd need by multiplying this by your expected "peak" viewer count:
100 viewers = 15 Mbits/sec
200 viewers = 29 Mbits/sec
500 viewers = 73 Mbits/sec
Usually when you're talking about a connection large enough to handle this there's also a limit on the total amount of data transfer per month, so it's worth looking at that too. If you assume that you'll be broadcasting 8 hours a day for the full 3 days of the event, a viewer who is connected the whole time will consume around 1.5 gigabytes of data from your server. So, you can multiply this out by the average number of listeners you expect to figure out how much transfer you'd need:
100 viewers = 155 gigabytes
200 viewers = 310 gigabytes
500 viewers = 770 gigabytes
and so on.
I don't really know how many viewers actually connect but it's probably not more than 200 for a popular regional (and that'd be peak, not average).