Anyone else have problem with CSULA's webcast against Chico?

Well, here's e-mail I sent to the SID of CSULA and cc'd the AD - after a couple hours of frustration:

Title: Feb. 17 CSULA vs Chico Basketball webcast: epic fail from where I sit

Hello,

Don't get me wrong - I deeply appreciate the attempt to stream the game, it's just that it didn't work tonight. I usually don't have trouble watching live streams when the streaming servers themselves aren't having problems.

During your broadcast I would only be able to stream, say, twenty seconds of the game at a time and them it would stop. Using the Pause button, to give the presentation some extra time to buffer, which usually works when the streaming server is slow - did not work . The progress bar did not indicate that the buffering was continuing.

So the point of this e-mail, besides just giving you some data about your failed webcast, is to suggest that, if your server "pipes" can't handle the "overload" of a Chico State fan base (and probably some Humboldt State fans as well since they're very interested too this late in the season), that maybe you need to give up on your current system and go ustream (though video quality of a ustream broadcast is inferior to what yours looked like, in the few glimpses I got when it work briefly) I wish your system worked better and you didn't have to go ustream, but....

This D2 sports Internet streaming popularity is only going to grow, maybe not be a smash hit, but it will grow and so will your game attendance, hopefully.

Your server's log files should tell the story of the population of viewers - look at how many people tried to connect, and how many people continually tried to refresh the page in desperation (I'm assuming an overloaded server dropping connections would cause extra connection attempts from the same IP address when people are having problems.)

Note that once the game was over and the camera was still, aimed at the scoreboard (way less data needed to stream a still picture than a moving one, like when the basketball game is in progress), and many people had given up so you didn't have nearly as many connections - only then did the broadcast start to work for me. But the game was over.

Sorry for the bad news.

John Miller
Arcata CA (Humboldt State Fan)

Attached: a screenshot of a speedtest.net test of my download speed that shows it a 2.54Mbps (plenty of bandwidth to cleanly receive streaming video.)