Communicado Lifeline

This is where we all touch base if a livestream concert goes awry.

 

 

Metheny Crash and Burn Livestream

Hello Good People!

Writing you today from marathon tech detectives headquarters — formally known as SpragueLand Livestreams Inc. 
 
What a fiasco that was the other night for the Metheny show. We got off to a good start but then Murphy, who was jacked on steroids, paid us a visit and eventually shut us down completely —to the floor, on our knees, begging for fresh unadulterated bandwidth. Urrggg! 
 
I’ll go into all that happened and where we’re at now but here’s another issue —when things go bad there isn’t a way to communicate with you, dear devoted listeners. Once we have to jump ship from the bugged up stream we then loose the tether that connects us. So in the future, and super hoping this doesn’t happen again, I’ve added a page on my website (www.petersprague.com) called Communicado Lifeline http://petersprague.com/communicado-lifeline/ that’ll serve as a touchstone for me to let you know what’s up and where to go to continue the fun. This will help.
 
So back to what happened the other night in the stream.
 
After two days of rehearsals and loads of hours prepping the music and the cams, we were all tuned up for liftoff. But right in the beginning, right when Steve pushed the On Air button, YouTube said it wasn’t getting the data quick enough. It slogged along and held up poorly for the first song and that’s when El Chatmeister filled me in with the details. I know that what you were seeing on your end wasn’t pretty and thanks for letting us know through the chat. We then stopped playing and started trying to figure out a fix. We rebooted the modem and the router, plugged and unplugged devices but no matter what we did the YouTube error message persisted. We then called off the concert, said sorry to the other musos, whispered a sincere sorry in the open air outside hoping that you, the listeners, would know our sincere sentiment, and then proceeded to run tests on the equipment so that we might be able to get the show back and running for next week.
 
That first night we thought the problem was in the video switcher and the idea was to talk with tech support the next morning and  either get it fixed or buy a new one.
 
Time for sleep.
 
At 4am I was still dreaming of solutions and decided to get up and get on it. Digital Brian soon came up to the office and we formulated a plan. Blackmagic Design (the guys that make the vid switcher) start their tech support at 6am and we were right on it. They gave us some good ideas but they didn’t think the problem was in their device.
 
Next, we drove to Del Mar to a friends house who has Spectrum as their internet provider. We have Cox. We set up the essentials and ran the gear on their internet connection. It worked perfectly with the communcation to YouTube completely error free. The freaky thing is that our internet UP speed is much higher at 40mb’s compared to our Del Mar friends UP speed of 10. 
 
So now we know it’s not the vid switcher but the problem lies somewhere after the vid switcher and YouTube. We also ran a test going to Facebook Live and ran into the same issue of data not making it there quick enough. So this then suggests that the problem lies between our vid switcher and YouTube live and that means there might be something that’s changed with Cox’s handling of the data.
 
Where we’re at now, Digital Brian has unearthed some software that follows the path of how the data flows and he’s looking at some wicked graphs trying to see if there are any roadblocks along the way. So far no. We also bought a new cable modem and router, installed them and unfortunately the same issue persisted. And thus, so far we haven’t figured it out. 
 
Urrggghh.
 
We do know that we can stream at a slightly lower quality and it’ll sneak by. We hate to do this and why did it work so well for six months and now it’s having problems? And as far as we can figure out nothing has changed on our end.
 
Urrrghh X 3!
 
So we’ll keep at it and if for some magic coincidence, one of you out there has an solution, we’re all ears.
 
On Sunday we’re doing a livestream with Leonard and I think it’ll work on the lower quality setting. It’s with a stellar band and beautiful music. Here’s the link:
 
I’ll be in touch soon about redoing the Metheny show. I’m hoping for next week. 
 
And to those that donated bucks please know that your donation will go towards the upcoming show.
 
That’s the story for now and thanks your kind words and loyalty, all best, Peter