Petition for Better Championship Video

[dcarr]

Originally Posted by Deetman

Sean definitely nailed the reasons for YouTube... Being able to explain to grandparents over the phone how to watch the event their grandchild is participating is huge. Good luck explaining twitch or livestream or any other streaming service to someone less technically inclined over the phone. Everyone knows how to use YouTube.

I'm going to have to disagree with you here. From a usability perspective, if all you are doing is clicking a link that brings up the live stream, there is absolutely no difference in any of the major streaming services.

• Email link to person, post it on Twitter/FB/Website, read it to them over the phone
• Person visits link, sees video, watches

[dcarr]

Originally Posted by Deetman

There is much more that can be posted on the complexities of webcasting events, but the first and primary for championships is bandwidth. To run 8 streams simultaneously at 720p, you are looking at 16Mbps minimum upload and that is without any overhead and minimum quality settings. Ideally you'd be looking at around 40Mbps upload to comfortably stream 8 720p streams at high quality, which may not even be available from the venue. Assuming that NASA is running the streams through a satellite uplink, I highly doubt that their uplink is capable of sustaining 40Mbps. This doesn't even touch on the reliability required for it and ignores other internet requirements at the venue for the event.

Solid LTE should be able to exceed these qualifications comfortably. There are even professional HD casting solutions that load balance between multiple LTE modems to obtain the highest QoS. You could rig something up similar with a consumer router running DD-WRT.

I guarantee that there are people in this very thread that could have run the Championship streams far better than NASA did with consumer grade hardware. That's what's disappointing.

[ThePancakeMan]

Originally Posted by Skyehawk

I recorded a wack ton of the livestream, I have to edit, render and upload a fair bit still, but I have ALL Einstein a fair number of quals and playoffs on Galileo, finals on Hopper and a few others.

Shameless self promotion: Videos will be uploaded soon on the channel: Skyehawk
(Videos will of course NOT be monetized by me)
(I've had relatively good luck with my uploads not getting flagged, hopefully that holds for the 50ish matches I have)

Link to channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKq...uW0-xP5BgAraYw

Thank you so much for this!

[blazingbronco18]

Originally Posted by Deetman

As Dan said above, MAR streams out emcee, game announcer, game sounds and any additional microphones used. The setup has changed since Dan saw it last, but all of our audio goes in to our DJ's audio mixer and then we get one feed from them without any copyrighted music.

Sean definitely nailed the reasons for YouTube... Being able to explain to grandparents over the phone how to watch the event their grandchild is participating is huge. Good luck explaining twitch or livestream or any other streaming service to someone less technically inclined over the phone. Everyone knows how to use YouTube.

There is much more that can be posted on the complexities of webcasting events, but the first and primary for championships is bandwidth. To run 8 streams simultaneously at 720p, you are looking at 16Mbps minimum upload and that is without any overhead and minimum quality settings. Ideally you'd be looking at around 40Mbps upload to comfortably stream 8 720p streams at high quality, which may not even be available from the venue. Assuming that NASA is running the streams through a satellite uplink, I highly doubt that their uplink is capable of sustaining 40Mbps. This doesn't even touch on the reliability required for it and ignores other internet requirements at the venue for the event.

Unfortunately, taking the audio from the announcer and emcee isn't very plausible for regional events. As we ran into this problem at the Utah regional, they said that they were not able to connect the announcer and emcee. In they end they got a student announcing the game, for those watching on the stream.

[ArtemusMaximus]

Originally Posted by Joey1939

Stream Quality - Comcast
...
Stream quality also varies greatly from Regional to Regional. Some have excellent streams, whereas other don't have one.
...

Also, some Regionals did not have webcast at all

[Deetman]

Originally Posted by dcarr

I'm going to have to disagree with you here. From a usability perspective, if all you are doing is clicking a link that brings up the live stream, there is absolutely no difference in any of the major streaming services.

• Email link to person, post it on Twitter/FB/Website, read it to them over the phone
• Person visits link, sees video, watches

While yes that is simple, but what if said person isn't on a computer? Are they on a tablet or smart TV? If so, they probably have a YouTube app either preinstalled or installed already. Twitch/Live stream? Probably not. Yes twitch is a legitimate platform but it does not have the brand recognition/familiarity for some outside the FRC community to make them comfortable. This doesn't even touch the technical offerings YouTube has that Twitch/others do not.

Originally Posted by dcarr

Solid LTE should be able to exceed these qualifications comfortably. There are even professional HD casting solutions that load balance between multiple LTE modems to obtain the highest QoS. You could rig something up similar with a consumer router running DD-WRT.

I guarantee that there are people in this very thread that could have run the Championship streams far better than NASA did with consumer grade hardware. That's what's disappointing.

Yes I am aware of such solutions using LTE and they may be feasible to use. I can tell you from experience though that you can't just hook the stuff up and expect it to work. I would want to test my connection at each venue and have solid data trying to use such a system with 40k+ people with cell phones at the venue using the limited wireless bandwidth before I would ever propose such a solution to FIRST.

Consumer grade hardware is just asking for trouble in my opinion. I'm not saying the equipment needs to be the most expensive professional solution available but consumer equipment has a tendency to choke at the worst times in mission critical applications.

Originally Posted by blazingbronco18

Unfortunately, taking the audio from the announcer and emcee isn't very plausible for regional events. As we ran into this problem at the Utah regional, they said that they were not able to connect the announcer and emcee. In they end they got a student announcing the game, for those watching on the stream.

This is one of the advantages and reasons why you see districts leading the way on the live webcast front. We can control and specify much more at our events. MAR for example contracts the same DJ company for all of our events. They have a audio mixer that they use that exactly meets our need for local in venue production and for the webcast. We bring in our video case, make three audio connections, and we are setup on the audio front.

FIRST could probably do more on this front to make sure that guidelines for event audio specify isolated audio, etc. but I don't know what they currently say.

[dcarr]

Originally Posted by Deetman

While yes that is simple, but what if said person isn't on a computer? Are they on a tablet or smart TV? If so, they probably have a YouTube app either preinstalled or installed already. Twitch/Live stream? Probably not. Yes twitch is a legitimate platform but it does not have the brand recognition/familiarity for some outside the FRC community to make them comfortable. This doesn't even touch the technical offerings YouTube has that Twitch/others do not.

These services work fine in modern mobile browsers. Installing an app isn't required for basic viewing functionality.

What are the "technical offerings" you're talking about?

Originally Posted by Deetman

Yes I am aware of such solutions using LTE and they may be feasible to use. I can tell you from experience though that you can't just hook the stuff up and expect it to work. I would want to test my connection at each venue and have solid data trying to use such a system with 40k+ people with cell phones at the venue using the limited wireless bandwidth before I would ever propose such a solution to FIRST.

You're definitely right, and this is why something like load balancing between different providers can be used to mitigate this somewhat.

Obviously a solid connection from the venue is going to be far and away the best option. Without knowing what is available at the Dome, I can only speculate why the stream quality was so poor.

[Deetman]

Originally Posted by dcarr

What are the "technical offerings" you're talking about?

Primarily in comparison to twitch, YouTube has much better DVR/live event recording capabilities. This may have changed in the last 6 months since I last looked.

While not necessarily technically necessary and I may reevaluate using it for MAR streams next year, YouTube is much friendlier to 1080p60fps streams. We don't have "partner" status that we have to achieve or pay to get access to all of YouTube's features.

Other than copyright issues, which we made it through 7 events this year without any streams being taken down, I have yet to ever hear a compelling argument to NOT use YouTube.

Anyway, I digress. We are moving away from the original topic and I'm still on mobile traveling. I'm probably going to put out some details on the MAR equipment and methodology here in the coming months. Look for that then or send me a message for additional questions.

[JimInNJ]

Maybe it's time for FIRST to hit up an existing national sponsor (AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon) that's in the bandwidth industry to provide some "in-kind" donation of high bandwidth access to at least the Championships? To these folks 40Mb/s is peanuts, and the national exposure would certainly generate enough goodwill from the FIRST community to offset the expenses.