Last week the first live internet stream from GCC was viewed. The story around it is a tiny testiment to the family bond people have at our church. One of our key A/V volunteers was in Singapore and badly wanted to be here for Doug's memorial service Friday. Weds morning the A/V guys came to Ed and I inquiring about doing a live internet stream using some new technology they had. They had recently purchased a Tricaster unit and it had streaming capability. 
The Tricaster is a sweet device that can take multiple audio and video feeds and do live switching and mixing ... and has built-in encoders for recording and media server for streaming the feed live via the web. The setup on the Tricaster turned out to be cake...click the Record or Stream tab...select live stream...copy the URL displayed in the feed window into a web browser...taadaa, you've got a live internet stream! 
We tested it internal and it worked like a charm. It appears to max out at 364kbps. So then Ed did a quick tweak on the firewalls and had his wife over at Notre Dame give it a test. Flawless :-)
Then they contacted the guy in Singapore and had him test it. He was able to get the stream with no problem...and he noted it was auto negotating the bandwidth to keep from stuttering.
Thursday night Ed watched our New Community service from his home and said it was very clear. The memorial service Friday was incredible...made me so incredibly proud to be a part of this church. The guy in Singapore reported back that he was so appreciative that he could partipate in the service from half way around the world.
That's the family spirit around here and it's just so great to be a part of it!
We're not publishing the streaming URL but to a few select staff at this point. I'd love to offer our Thursday night service as a live stream, but there is a lot of testing and questions to go through first.
Of course you can view a bunch of our media on-demand on our website ... go to http://gccwired.com and click the media player icon in the top right.
Will GCC have live streaming in the future? We'll let ya know as we dig deeper into the research. And check out the Tricaster. It's a pretty sweet piece of technology for $5000MSRP ... I can't wait to see what the A/V guys do with it as they get more familiar with it's capabilities.
edit: I just noticed bloggin' A/V guru Anthony Coppedge did a review on the Tricaster back in May '05. He gave it big thumbs up. Anthony - any details you can give around the streaming aspect of the Tricaster? Stuff like how many connections can it support viewing a live stream? Ed and I are guessing 10 since that's the limit of connections in native XP. I can't find any real details off their website.
Could you stream this to a commercial streaming company who would then restream (maybe a few second delay) with more possible connections? Could give you more users without using up all your bandwidth.
Posted by: Chris Marsden | September 27, 2005 at 11:13 AM
As for 'how many simultaneous streams' TriCaster can handle, Jason, the number 10 is a licensing limitation, but real-world bandwidth would be more on the order of 3 to 4 simultaneous viewers before your church's ethernet connection maxed out.
The best situation for broad distribution of the stream is to send a single stream of the highest-bandwidth to a streaming service provider (such as www.internetvideochannel.com) who would then provide as many streams as you need.
Posted by: Paul Lara | October 03, 2005 at 06:16 PM
Paul,
Thanks for the info. Just got off the phone with Brad Giotes over at IVC. We're looking to try a test run through his system next week.
Stay tuned everyone...
Jason
Posted by: Jason Powell | October 04, 2005 at 04:13 PM
Yeah, 10 is the limit, but that's assuming you aren't tapping out the TriCaster PC, as it's still limited on how much it can push. So, the more you're doing with the TriCaster, the lower the number (and quality in FPS).
However, it's a really not intended to be the main serving host. The idea is to send the stream to a dedicated server so that it can avoid the limitations of the TriCaster.
As a side note, I was hired to work with NewTek to help develop that particular product and then brought back in to tweak the interface GUI. It's quite impressive for $5k, but there are new - uhm - versions (can I say that under NDA?) coming soon. I can't give more info than that, but this little box is up for a Technical Emmy award, so I'm proud to have been part of the dev team.
Oh, one last thing - iVGA. Totally new technology. I freaked when I saw it. You can take another PC/Mac and use your 10/100 network connection to send your screen information (limited to 1024x768 - for now) as a non-video (i.e., scaled 1024x768) input. So if you also use the VGA output on the TriCaster, you can avoid scan converting the incoming PC signal and instead use native XGA resolution. Way cool.
Final comment: at $5K, it's not the end-all-be-all product. It's aimed at non-video people to have an all-in-one portable video setup that's pretty simple to use. Remember, it's not what you can do with it, but what you can't do with it that will deterine how well it will fit into your application.
OK...done rambling.
- Anthony D. Coppedge
Posted by: Anthony D. Coppedge | October 08, 2005 at 12:16 PM