Disappointed by Kickoff webcast quality

[skippy178]

I have to say that I was disappointed by the quality of the Kickoff webcast.

The Kickoff producers seemed to be concentrating more on fancy motion backgrounds (like those clouds that were on the big screen behind the lectern area much of the time). The result, for those of us watching by NASA TV webcast, was that the poor old MPEG (or whatever) encoders providing the Windows Media feed wasted too much precious bandwidth trying to keep up with the ever-changing background images that were behind the speakers.

For me to read the speakers name and title, it took about 2 seconds after it appeared before the static elements in the video stream stabilised enough from a grainy initial image, to one that was actually readable. I was watching at a corporate sponsor's site that should have had plenty of bandwidth on the incoming Internet feed, so I do not believe that bandwidth was an issue that can be used to explain such poor video quality.

Maybe for future FIRST events the producers will remember that not everyone can tune into the NASA TV satellite feed, and so doing without some of the fancy "slick" production that we typically see on game shows, the nightly news, MTV awards ceremonies etc has to be forsaken in order to provide a decent quality live feed for webcast viewers i.e. the lowest common denominator.

Cheers

Skippy