Todays Online Convservation Challenges and Success Stories

In light of today's stay at home, work from home, quarantine mind sets has given rise to more than just text and email communications now to full video chats and group meetings. We have always been a people who thrive off face to face discussions given the growth of apps and other technologies. There is so much more we express through our body language and facial expressions. Not to mention the loss of social iteration when we just talk over a voice based system.

As many of us have jumped on the bandwagon of using Zoom, WebEx, Teams and dozens more of video conferencing systems we have moved to an unstructured method of interacting. And most importantly have not paid attention to the risks and challenges that come with these tools. They are not necessarily a dangerous technology, however our lack of understanding how to deploy and use them is what can be dangerous.

How do you find the right tool for your audience? Do you need just audio. Do you need group or individual chat? Do you need to share file? Do you need "broadcast" video for a single person to a group? Do you need full group discussion for 5, 10 or 500 people? And do you mind if the information becomes publicly available through Google, Yahoo or Facebook?

Some services may take your meeting discussion, notes, documents and make them publicly available. Your meeting may be publicly available by default for others to join. Read about the story this week from California this week where several schools were #zoombombing interrupted the education experience with profane and disgusting content.

Be smart. Talk to your IT expert. Take time to read through all of the "Settings" in the application. If you don't know what something means like "Chime on Entry" then ask on Twitter or another platform or to other users. Do a dry run of the meeting between your phone & computer or someone else and see the experience from a "host" and a "participant". Learn what it means to use a password with your meeting or a waiting room?

If you are going to hand over the meeting to another host then practice that so you know what to expect in terms of delay on the screen and experience on the screen. Be cautious when you start using a new technology, especially when it comes to work.

Wowza and Haivision Streaming

Producing live audio broadcasts for 3000 to 5000 listeners can be a big challenge. Shoutcast or Nicecast were good for mp3 streams with about 900 listeners. Enter Amazon, Akamai and other CDNs and you have an infrastructure to reach a larger listener ship. My challenge was limited budget and a relatively diverse environment of encoders and listening devices. With no set standard to reach all. Enter Haivision and now Wowza. It used to be Amazon and Akamai cloud encoders were leaders. But the cost was too prohibited. Haivision and Wowza now use a common engine and its simple to setup and use. Produce just a single RTMP stream and their applications have user interfaces where you type in a few URLs and click start. Within 30 seconds you can hear the stream and see the crystal clear video. The biggest challenge is multibit rate needs, multiple protocols and last mile connectivity. It appears that Akamai has this handled with additional edge servers to help 3G/4G coverage. I'm sure Level3, MirrorImage and other CDNs are following suite. 2014 brings a renewed challenge. Delivering a single RTMP stream but output it through a single transcoder. And deliver it with multibit rate support. And venue coverage of WiFi and 3G/4G will also be enhanced, so I suspect to see a few thousand more listeners each day! What challenges has live streaming brought to you?