Webcast Is Off!

Sorry folks, especially all of those who said they were definitely going to tune in, and Caroline who is organising a party for the event. We have all the technology and it all works, but last week we hit some networking issues up at the venue.

They told us that they had a wireless network, and stupidly, I assumed that it worked throughout the building. I went up last week to test it, and found that unfortunately, having installed their wireless hub in a storeroom off the kitchen, surrounded by fridges, stainless steel and about a dozen walls, it didn't extend to the room where our ceremony is.

We were ready to give up at that point, after trying a few basic things myself, but a friend of ours had some other wireless networking stuff, better cards, and a repeater that may have made the difference, and indeed it looked that way for a while last night.

Then we found out that they actually had a wired connection 20 yards away, something they had neglected to tell us until this point! Yay, we thought, we are homefree! So we connected everything up, Mike was going to make us a long cable, and we would just run it around the room.

Learning from past mistakes, I said, OK, let's just try the whole thing end to end then and make sure it works. We got it all set up, port forwarding, encoding software, etc and started broadcasting, but could not see anything on the website. We called our broadcast expert, who said it was probably something in their internal network and internet setup that was blocking it.
On the phone to their ISP, we found that there were some fundamental flaws in their set-up, that were likely prohibiting the transmission, and gave us some ideas, but could not guarantee that even if we could have these changes made in two days, that it would even work. On top of that, their IT consultant, of course decided he wanted to charge to fix his own original crappy installation.

So it's time to give up, which really pisses me off, because we know the technology works and works very well. So the back up plan is to record the whole thing on a digital video recorder, then publish it on the web a few days after the event, which I guess for those who would have had to be up at odd hours, is probably a blessing.