I decided to document my last event. don’t know what this falls under, but hopefully it helps others.
so lets get started
the event
I was contacted by the client to do a live webcast for a horse show. I would setup everything needed prior to the event, and also come to the event location for a day and a half to insure everything ran smoothly, was setup, etc.
the setup
We used fms installed on a media temple extreme server. The extreme server was to be used initially because we didn’t know how many users would be watching. if and when traffic to the feed started to elevate we’d contact mt to upgrade to a nitro server.
for broadcasting we used flash media encoder
day one
I arrived at the event to learn we still needed to pick up some of the equipment to access the video feed. We got to circuit city (no fry’s nearby) and decided on the WinTV-HVR-950 model 1145 from hauppauge.
after arriving at the event, this is the day before the actual event, we found out the a/v people wouldn’t arrive till the morning of the event 
so the day was pretty much spent making sure everything was running, installed, etc.
day two – seehorse politics
day two started off badly to say the least. the company doing the video “seehorse” apparently had some issues because they had originally wanted to do the web feed. this lead to us receiving the feed used for internal broadcasting which completely sucked and had no audio, we dealt with this the best we could.
luckily they also had brought in outside video people to assist with the filming of the event. Namely Thomas “Rick” Rommarito. I can’t say enough about Rick Rommarito. Rick saw our feed and told us not to worry. Rick ran us a direct feed to the video, audio, and was a great help. keep in mind that seehorse video’s staff had pretty much told me and the company that had hired me to blow off (with out saying it of course). we we’re pretty much ignored by the seehorse video team. so thank you again to Thomas “Rick” Rommarito for everything he did. He is the only reason we got a good video feed or audio. If you found this article while searching on seehorse, please don’t use them, contact rick directly at : rickbommarito[at][sbcglobal][dot][net]. Very knowledgeable a/v guy.
day two – the server
so half way through the day we finally had a good video and audio feed, after a few compatibility issues and tweaking we we’re up and running. here are screen shots from both fms admin, and top to show you how we’re on resources. the cpu usage for the fms process is wrong, so look at the actual cpu usages. for any one interested we maintained about 220-230 concurrent users throughout the day. once that number started to increase is when the server started having issues (end of day). I’d say keep users at about 200 concurrent if your going to be on an extreme.
early in the day we realized we’d need to upgrade to the nitro asap. I contacted mt, and was told we could be upgraded by the following morning. near the end of the day when i contacted mt again for an eta we found out all nitros were sold out for at least a week.
*update* – turns out there was a communication issue. one of the techs had a nitro on standby, but the night shift wasn’t in the loop. found this out the following week
edgecast to the rescue
with our upgrade plan now shot we needed a new host. after limelight told us there’s a 7 day wait, and Akamai seems to have outsourced their entire operation. speaking with someone at Akamai was just pointless, not to mention I didn’t hear back from a sales rep for two days, and that was also outsourced.
*update – I received a call from their guys two weeks later, asking what type of service i want!*
Edgecast was a different story, they knew we we’re 3 steps from being screwed and had us up and running within hours, I’ve already spoken on them in a previous post, but i wanted to make sure i mentioned them again. it normally takes a few days to get everything setup, but james seriously helped us out.
day three
day three had us with a brand new video feed, a new feed to computer setup, and edgecast streaming.
first off the edgecast streaming is great, any future events will use them, screw maintaining our own fms servers.
by the end of the day everything was finally running smoothly, and i got a flight heading back home
issues
our biggest issue was video, which luckily for us Thomas Rick Rommarito handled that.
next up was our server, we’d previously spoken to mt to make sure the nitro was ready on standby. *update – see previous update * I can’t be mad at mt though, as they have proven over and over again to be rock solid and caring. they even contacted me twice after about the nitro issue. edgecast was amazing. their support, network, and customer service was amazing. both myself and the client we’re happy with them, and now the client will be rolling out an entire service using the edgecast system, which leaves me happy to build with their system again.
after those two major issues the reoccurring issue was stream quality. horse shows are very motion intensive, and although we had a good feed, we didn’t have good lighting at all. i recommend any hauppauge product, because I use them at home, and every other encoder tested lacked the features it had. we tryed a few different one’s at the clients request, but in the end always went back to the hauppauge.
to overcome some of the lighting issues i used hauppauge’s built in features to adjust the feed which helped produce a better feed. the client had purchased a number of other encoders because he wanted to split the video / audio with another device. I’ll never again use a pyro product. once we started using the pyro adapter it created nothing but issues.
so once we had the hauppauge device back as the video source i was able to tweak settings and get a decent quality stream that had little lag, good motion, and decent to to good quality. I found the sweet spot to be at a 380 bit rate. the client wanted clear motion, but also needed the horses and people to be of good quality also staying around 380 offered the best motion and quality without being to bandwidth heavy. we broadcasted at a custom 16:9 resolution.
another issue was that the client had an outsource team that developed, and maintained the broadcast site. any changes had to go directly through them. they’re a good group, but often the need to contact them for changes, as well as time differences we’re frustrating. I tried to use the player the client already had in place, but in the end just hacked out a quick and simple player when i finally got completely frustrated.
in the end
so what did i learn? motion intensive events are a different experience than non motion intensive ones. don’t use pyro products. use edgecast, the quality of our stream when using their network was worth it.
I’ve normally ran our own fms server for broadcasts events. I won’t ever again, the cost and benefits of edgecasts service just makes setting up and maintaining a fms server pointless. It’s less of a headache, and you don’t need to monitor anything. In the end the cost of using edgecast is less when you add the man hours, maintenance, headaches, chain smoking, etc.
media temple dv extremes are good for around 200-210 concurrent users, after than your gonna start feeling it.
also something I realized : widescreen formats (16:9) are better then 4:3 for live streams. I found that when using a wide screen format the viewing experience was alot better, especially at smaller sizes than traditional 4:3 format. i was able to reduce the viewer and stream size by going to widescreen, and the viewing experience was actually better.
Server Resources
that’s all folks
yes i know there’s more than goes into live streams, but this is just me giving a brief overview from an experience. hopefully this helps someone, and wasn’t just good intent, bad execution 
Sid
If you’d like to see the event streams recorded check out : http://www.iequine.com/
