Webcasting of Regionals

[Kyle Fenton]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I have a lot of questions about the regional webcasts:

First, can any informed person give me a number of approximately how many people "tune in" for one of these?
Also, what is the typical bandwidth size of the stream?
Why are some events webcasts and others not? Why are some archived (by NASA) and others not?
Where does the video come from, is it the same signal as what goes on the big screen?
What all goes into webcasting a regional? (equipment, staff, cost, etc.)

Answers to these questions would be greatly appreciated.

I will try to answer these as best as I can.

1. You can uni-cast from a personal PC, but only one PC can receive it. If you want a multi-cast you will have to have some sort of server. If you can multi-cast from a server, the number of people you can serve from is limited to your bandwidth. There may be some theoretical limit in the streaming software, but the bandwidth always cruds out before that.

2. The bandwidth varies, but expect to take up a lot, especially if you have a high quality stream.

3. The webcast have always been an un-official thing of FIRST. Basically if somebody can webcast it, they will. NASA only webcasts its own regionals.

4. Yes most webcasts are taken from the main feed. From there they are digitized, encoded, and streamed. The main feed is available to anybody who has a VCR or similar recording devise.

5. Well if you have all the equipment, and experience of web casting than not much goes in. The biggest challenge is try to find an internet connection with enough bandwidth. To do a basic "home-brew" webcast you can take a PC (fastest possible) and use a piece of software like Quicktime Broadcaster to uni-stream to a server off-site. Then the server can distribute the stream to specific number of people.

[Billfred]

About NASA webcasting regionals...I know Palmetto was webcast by NASA. Was that a NASA-sponsored regional last year or this year?