Is streaming video in world to an audience too dangerous to contemplate ?

An event at the SLCC in world build last weekend raises serious technical questions about the viability of streaming video inworld to multiple residents. It suggests there are serious flaws of which we are not aware, and thus has implications for any such future planned streaming event.

There was a fine official build at a four sim corner, with four video screens.

They never worked, the media streams were never set. The building work was for nothing.

We are told that a considered decision was made at the last moment that it was not technically allowable to even attempt to stream video to these well occupied sims, and that this decision arose from technical advice from a Linden source. Presumably immediate and urgent advice since the decision was only made at the very last moment.

The explanation we have been given is that the video servers must be protected from a lot of people all reconnecting at once, as would happen after a sim crash occurred. Not just that there would be delays and glitches, but that some sort of damage would occur so that the stream servers would fail, presumably for every one else as well. A sim crash was thought too likely for such a risk to be taken.

I can find no other source for warnings of this danger, but it was taken so seriously that the entire immersive aspect of the inworld SLCC video experience was totally wiped at no notice because of it.

Can you please confirm if this is correct? If it is please, give those planning streaming parties guidelines on the number or percentage of more or less simultaneous connections required to crash a typical stream server, as used by the Linden's for such events. How can we determine the limit on the number of avi's we may have in our audience in one sim ?

This is a very serious matter, it killed the SLCC event, and if the threat is real it means just one accidental sim crash could wipe out future events too, if the organisers are so foolhardy as to set up public screens at all, or if a resident organised viewing party gets too big.

Please tell us. What is the danger ? Is this true ?

We have much alternative practical evidence that it is not, in the form of completely successful streaming events to substantial audiences. This really needs to be cleared up, as none of us dare plan a streaming event or a dual reality experience until it is.

Or were non-linden servers used for SLCC, and it is a question of which type, and whose ? Will every future event be a lottery ?

Please give us what advice you can, on how to avoid such a disaster again..

Hey Ellie, something sounds missing from that because QuickTime video streaming passes through from the broadcasting server to the viewer, and should have *no* such depreciable effect on a Second Life simulator.

I've been to events with 100+ Resis spread across 4-sim corners and movies playing, with four parcels, each one of them set to the same streaming URL. There've been problems where the bandwidth on the broadcaster got saturated and video broke down and choppy and then sped up again when those issues were resolved, but the sim didn't crash. Some clients did, yes, but not the whole region.

So in this case, the fundamental dependency rests not with our hardware, but the broadcasting server's capability to deliver content on demand. The scenario you describe sounds like there may have been a misunderstanding unless there's further context not mentioned within, so if concerned, it's well worth doing experiments in an attempt to reproduce the problems under actual load conditions, but I wouldn't worry.