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| OFSAA Webcast Success |
 A last minute request to do an Internet Webcast for the Girls AA Volleyball Provincial Championships live from Dryden, Ontario surpassed all expectations. " I watched the game on the web cam and I felt like a was there! Thanks for letting me share in the whole experience with the team! Again thanks for the great job you did covering the games! " How was it done? The webcast technology was based on an open source project encoding the video to H.264. The OFSAA video team had 3 cameras at the main gym and a Telecaster to switch between the cameras while overlaying the score onto the video. The A/V equipment was plugged directly into the Daemon Defense capture workstation where it was encoded live to the H.264 format. From here things started getting interesting. The school provided more than enough bandwidth to transport the stream back to our main servers in Texas. In Texas we have a direct connection to 11 - 1/GBPS pipes straight onto the Internet. The only limiting factor to the entire system was the 100mb/s network connection from the server to the switch. Once it was on these pipes they would be more than fast enough for everyone to watch the webcasting in real time. What were the challenges? Since this was the first time this has been done for an OFSAA tournament we were optimistically hoping for 20-30 viewers per match. The webcasting was not heavily advertised and was promoted as something for parents to watch the girls who couldn't make the trip to Dryden. We decided to use a fairly large bitrate for the best quality video. This turned out to be a costly mistake. Within 60 seconds of starting the software for the first game, the connection count shot up to over 60 concurrent viewers. Five minutes into the match we were supporting an average of 70 viewers at an average bitrate of 450kbps. The server was starting to choke on providing the video consistently at over 30mbps. We were able to keep the connections open and the audio from stuttering but the trade off was some dropped frames along the way. The results? The decision was made to ride out the traffic instead of limiting the number of viewers who could watch. We throttled back the bandwidth marginally to accommodate for the spike in viewers for the playoffs and easily provided video to over 100 viewers for the gold medal game. Next time with more than a few days advance notice we'll be able to run multiple servers and raise the bar on live sports webcasting. |
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