I think we can all agree that the legislature’s new webcast sucks ass. It was not even close to up to the task. Many people (including me) could not access it at all for most of the debate, and those who could get it had to suffer through choppy audio that made it nearly impossible to figure out what was going on.
The lege should promptly renew their contract with WGBH to broadcast formal sessions on channel 44, as they have been doing for years. If they want to run a webcast in addition, that’s great, but it is no substitute for TV coverage.
And in blog news, we experienced extremely heavy traffic today — our third-highest day ever (after primary day and election day), and most of it was concentrated in only a couple of hours. At least for me, the site held up pretty well — it got slow at one point when the live-blog thread got really long, but it never crashed. Thanks to the soapblox gang for that.
More on the substance of what happened today at a later time.
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HIS didn’t update us from Windows 98 until 2002. House had no internet access until 2001 (Senate did, but not the House). These people are no more qualified to put on a webcast than fly to the moon- and Mr. Buckley et al are VERY dedicated. Just underequipped and understaffed.
like, maybe the lege didn’t want close coverage of their activities. because as so many of us citizen activists have witnessed over time, very undemocratic tactics are brought to bear by “leadership” and others who are our elected representatives in the legislature. maybe it’s no coincidence that the WGBH channel 44 broadcast was replaced by the shi–ty webcast to distance and exclude the public from the process…
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No words can express the outrage and frustration of having to live as a citizen in this Commonwealth where backroom “be a good girl” politics continue to rule the day. (“good girl” was said by Senate President Travaglini to colleague Senator Karen Spilka as she cast the “correct leadership vote” to keep the HC amendment dead in a sham study committee).
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the anti-equal marriage vote result sickens me; there is much work to do to move at least 12 votes to the side of equal rights before the 2nd concon vote is taken. a piece of this work includes securing the technology that enhances, not hinders, public participation in efforts to restore a functioning democracy in our Commonwealth.
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the public needs and deserves both tv broadcast and quality webcast coverage.
Don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance.
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Technology curves are steep, and the Massachusetts Lege has behind the curves for some time as PP points out.
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Hopefully DP’s technology folks will use this as a great reason to work hard toward opening more of government up to the people.
… as in I was doing this 5 years ago (loadtesting for 100,000+ viewers for a 45 minute webcast keynote). Although it wouldn’t scale gracefully upward — complexity doesn’t.
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I’ll run you the numbers:
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Old viewership on ‘GBH’s Gavel to Gavel: probably around 25K for general sessions, 100K+ for ConCons, with upwards of half-a-million for the various marriage debates.
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A webcast will attract all of the previous audience plus folks without TV access at work who can pull up the feed, all on high speed. So you should expect to double the audience for House and Senate sessions; that’s 50K receiving IPs baseline.
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I’m pretty sure they had that. Part of the time I was getting a clean feed (though I missed ‘GBH’s overlay music; the dead air was kinda creepy). The dropouts I was seeing here make me think that their top capacity was somewhere in the quarter-million plus range, but that’s a truly blue-sky figure, running on the assumption that they used the 50K baseline.
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Then you need to accurately gauge what your “escalated” audience will be (the Shrub administration has permanently tarnished the word ‘surge’ for me). I would have guesstimated a million, and advised the client (Commonwealth) and ISP to allocate for 10% plus, or 1,100,000 receiving streams. That means renting out one of the content aggregators as a server farm for the session. Which is not the cheapest proposition.
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The other thing they could have done (and didn’t) was to provide an audio-only feed in addition to the video feed. A lot of us would have been happy enough with audio only (especially at work) if it had been clear. That would probably halve the top audience for video. But you’d still need more servers and a bigger pipe.
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Lastly, they didn’t have any graceful failover schemes. Just choppy streaming (1 word in 3) or “connection to server dropped” errors. Plus the platform issues — I’ve listened to WMP football games on Mac for years, I’m not used to being forced to switch platforms because the server won’t accept the connection.
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I am not optimistic about this being corrected, since it’s clearly in the legislator’s interest to reduce scrutiny.
The job USED to be a hack job for out of work guys with connections.
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Someday – go find out who the Queen of the Documents Room is. The answer might surprise you (unless she got her pension time in and took off).