Storm Chasers who stream live video!

[Tony Perkins]

A weather indifferent friend mentioned that he came across it on metafilter.com yesterday. So it's happening already, and it's just a matter of time before it gets posted during an outbreak on one of the major hitting sites.

I can virtually assure you that at some point, probably on a big chase day, your service is going to get noticed by Fark, Digg, or Reddit, which is going to mean around a half million visitors to your service, with at least 20,000 people trying to watch streams at once.

 

[Kory Hartman]

Question: Does SevereStudios keep a copy of their lives feeds (an archive) for later review?

We do!

But only for use by the individual chasers, if they ask, to watch their feeds, and see what they looked like. They can have them for their site for a small fee (every little bit in or out of the streaming server costs us)...

We also may, from time to time, post an archived video on our site for people to watch, but that's turning into more hassle than it's worth right now.

 

[kenny_allen]

Thanks Jay. For the chasers across the pond you (and other web cam users) are sure providing a super service here. I know plenty of UK chasers are checking in on the new cams. For me I had an almost constant stream last night, it was fantastic to watch. This technology can only improve. Whilst network reliant I'm sure it won't be long before the geeks get a satellite system running and 100% coverage. I wonder if Baron are on the case

Btw how does the autonet solution perform? I know a number of UK chasers coming over (incl myself) are considering this option, as it is now utilised by some car hire companies. Contract cellphone solutions are not an option for us.

Thanks.

Mark

Satellite internet will take a long time before it will have the upload speed that cellular internet will. While download speeds and nationwide access to satellite internet may be here soon, the upload speeds will be horrible, and not very effective for streaming video.

And to answer the question, or Server Technical Lead, Ben Holcomb, works for a major server house. We are ready to add more servers and up our bandwidth to a gigabit switch with a moments notice.

Last night we had over 3000 unique IP addresses and were pushing 20 Mbps data traffic. The server only hit 5% usage. We are ready to see what kind of results we will have on a big chase day!

Keep signing up! We are over 60 streamers at SevereStreaming.com! Just imagine 60 different feeds to choose from on a big chase day.

I want to add to Kelly's comments above. While we chose to archive the streamed footage, it will not be released to the public or used by SevereStudios.com without prior approval from the SevereStreamer. As we have said before, we do not resell your video, we do not claim any copyright, we will not put a logo over it. We will provide the archived footage to the chaser upon request. (For example, if Steve Miller TX wants the video from his chase to place on his website, we will provide that to him.) Now, some chasers may agree to allow us to provide archived footage on our website. If some agree to that, we will place the video on our site for viewing. I just want to make sure that people understand that we will only do this with approval from the copyright holder.

Unlike Ustream and Streamwebtown and others, we do not take your video and resell it. We do not violate your copyright.

Thanks!

 

[Ben Holcomb]

As for the server question, if we took a million visitors we would probably be dead in the water for a few hours until I could get more servers up. At our current capacity, we can handle somewhere between 5000 and 7500 streams. With a little work, we can upgrade to a gigabit switch port and up that to somewhere between 25 and 50 thousand viewers (I really do not know how much it'd be able to handle). I can add more servers as well if need be - Everything is done through ActiveDirectory, so it's as simple to add a server now as just installing Windows server, joining AD and setting up DNS for the new server.

As for our website, we are addressing ways to make it handle thousands of requests a minute. Our current implementation is high on the PHP/MySQL usage, so we are looking to build a static HTML page that can easily be switched to if need be. I hope that is not the case, but it may be over the next few days as it's looking to be a very active second half of the week!

I also plan on getting some changes to the portal done tonight. I would rather create pop up windows so that you can click which streams you would like to view instead of having them all auto-start and crash your browser. I was hoping I'd have a little more development time to fix our portal before a big chase, but I can't turn down having Thursday and Friday off from work and NOT going after a 45% hatched Day 3!

We eventually want to add GPS trackers. We are working on making that happen soon!

There's a lot of cool stuff to happen in the future. We've got a list of about 20 things we want to do. It just will take us some time!

 

[Stuart Robinson]

I got on better watching the streams on my XP workstaion ~ I needed to increase the number of internet streams that mybrowser could handle (default is just 2) - this is a registry tweak
http://improbulus.googlepages.com/tweak11.reg

tweak11.reg----------------
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
"MaxConnectionsPerServer"=dword:00000032
"MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server"=dword:00000032
--------------------------

 

[Joey Ketcham]

What kind of connection do David and them use to do the live stream? I have mobile internet through AT&T and can't imagine trying to stream video through that.

 

[David Drummond]

Sprint datacard (newest one). Most of the time streamed over 1xRTT though sometimes EVDO.

 

[J Kinkaid]

What kind of connection do David and them use to do the live stream? I have mobile internet through AT&T and can't imagine trying to stream video through that.

I have had more luck streaming with ATT and edge than I have had with Alltel when I used ustream to stream while in MS and GA and the data rates durring handoffs didn't fluctuate as much as Alltel did

 

[Darren Addy]

Ryan McGinnis is now streaming live (running a test this morning on an I80 trip from Lincoln to Kearney). Shouldn't be any connection problems there!

http://live.streamingstudio.com/ryan.mcginnis.asx

If you missed the exciting stream live , a 2 minute capture is here: http://www.screencast.com/users/cheekygeek/folders/Jing/media/acd3e10b-edde-4355-86c9-9de9f00c0537