September 30, 2013 archive

Sep 30

Lesson Learned The Hard Way – Google+ Hangouts On Air (HOA) Have A Maximum Time Limit of 4 Hours

I learned a hard lesson today that Google+ Hangouts On Air (HOA) are limited to 4 hours in length. Today when we were live streaming our five-hour ION Krakow conference out of Poland using a Google+ Hangout On Air (HOA) everything was going along fine. (It was, indeed, working over IPv6!) People were watching on both our Google+ page as well as our YouTube channel. All was fine.

Then, all of a sudden... it stopped. No warning. Nothing. I didn't even notice that the red "Broadcasting" button was gone from the G+ HOA window.

Someone pinged us on Twitter to let us know the stream was down... and sure enough, the HOA had stopped broadcasting... right in the middle of one of our panel sessions!

I had to quickly exit that HOA and then relaunch a new HOA, which resulted in a new HOA for people to join on our Google+ page... and then pointing people to a YouTube URL with our channel name ending in "/live" to get our live stream (in our case, http://www.youtube.com/user/depoy360/live).

What Happened?

Why did the Google+ Hangout On Air just quit broadcasting on us?

Gplus hoa four hoursI didn't have a definite answer... but if you look at the first YouTube recording of our ION Krakow event, you'll notice the interesting time amount that I'm highlighting in the image to the right.

Yep... 3:59:59!

So I was thinking either:

  1. Google+ Hangouts On Air have a 4 hour maximum; or
  2. there was some kind of software or network glitch conveniently at the 4 hour time mark. (And unicorns might be grazing in my back yard when I get back from my trip, too.)

I searched online tonight and couldn't find any reference to a time limit. I saw nothing in the Google+ HOA FAQ or even in the HOA Terms of Service. I looked through the Google+ HOA Technical Guide, too, and found again nothing there.

The Answer (Maybe?)

Then I wound up searching Google's Support site with the phrase "hangouts on air maximum time" and... ta da... there was an answer in Google's product forums from May 2012 that said:

the time limit for Hangouts On Air is 4 hours. At 4 hours, the broadcast will automatically stop.

which is exactly the experience we had today. There was also another answer in a product forum from December 2012 that said:

Hangouts On Air can last up to 4 hours. You’ll receive a warning when you have 1 hour remaining, and then subsequent warnings as you approach the 4 hour limit.

If there were any warnings, I have no idea where they went to. I certainly don't remember seeing any warnings! It just stopped.

What was worse what that the Google+ HOA window stopped broadcasting but still continued to show the video stream as per usual - so when I was just glancing at the window it all looked fine. I didn't notice that the big red button was missing.

Thankfully for me...

Now... being the paranoid type, I was recording the video out of Wirecast onto my local hard drive at the same time I was sending it to Google+ HOA, so I do now have a copy of the video of the several minutes in the middle of our panel that didn't get streamed. But:

  • It was a poor user experience for anyone watching to just have it stop.
  • We now have two video segments instead of one big one. (although that's not necessarily a bad thing... I just would have liked to break the segment at a break in the panels)
  • This means additional post-production work to stitch it all together.
  • We had no warning.

This last point is perhaps the biggest annoyance... if we had known there was a four-hour limit, we could have planned for that. We could have stopped and restarted in one of the breaks, for instance. We just didn't want to do that because then it means viewers have to start watching a new video stream, and we thought that some number of users might miss that they had to start watching a new stream.

We wanted the viewer experience to be as simple and painless as possible.

So consider this a warning for you all... should you decide to try using Google+ Hangouts On Air to live stream sessions longer than 4 hours, well, you need to first have some plan to break the HOA into smaller segments!

P.S. And yes, if you listen to our ION Krakow recording on YouTube, the first 1 hour and 45 minutes have terrible audio quality... but that will be the subject for a post tomorrow. Essentially, I missed that HOA had a separate setting for bringing in the audio from our camera (which was supplied by the A/V mixing board) and so I was using audio from my laptop's mic. :-( Thankfully: 1) we fixed it; and 2) I was running a backup audio recorder pulling an aux feed from the house mixer so I can bring that audio back in from that separate recorder.

P.P.S. I'll also be putting up a blog post in the next few days about how we successfully did do this live video streaming over IPv6.

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

Sep 30

Lesson Learned The Hard Way – Google+ Hangouts On Air …

I learned a hard lesson today that Google+ Hangouts On Air (HOA) are limited to 4 hours in length.... and to read the rest of the story, visit Disruptive Conversations...

(Good lesson that I shouldn't be posting articles at 1:00am! But leaving this post up here for a bit because there are now social media links out there pointing to this URL...)

Sep 30

Live Streaming ION Krakow Over IPv6 – Using Google+ Hangouts or YouTube Live

ion_krakow2013_blue_jpgWe’re doing something a little different (and risky) with our live streaming of ION Krakow today out of Krakow, Poland.  Instead of using our “regular” method of live streaming using the Internet Society’s Livestream.com account, we’re trying out a Google+ Hangout On Air (HOA) which will simultaneously broadcast the session live on our Deploy360 YouTube channel.  You should be able to watch the live webcast on either:

Why are we doing this?  Primarily because we accepted the challenge by Wes George on Twitter to “eat our own dogfood” and see if we could get livestreaming going out over IPv6.

Live streaming over IPv6

Livestream.com is currently IPv4-only and so we went looking at other options.  Without setting up our own server infrastructure, the two possible options that we’ve found seem to be:

I say “possible” because this will be our first test and we’re not honestly entirely sure whether the broadcast will go out over IPv6.  It turns out that PLNOG only has an IPv4 network and so our connection back to Google’s servers will be IPv4.  In theory, Google’s content distribution network (CDN) should then serve the video streams out over IPv4 or IPv6.  We’ll see (and we’d like your help – see below).

As far as the two services, YouTube Live was of most interest to me when testing because it allows us to schedule an event in advance and promote that URL – and then have the video go live at that URL at the appointed time.  However, I was unable to get my software to work consistently with YouTube Live (and didn’t have a whole lot of time to test).

I’m going instead with a Google+ Hangout On Air because the video chain worked well and it also broadcasts over on our YouTube channel.  So people should be able to see the livestream on either Google+ or on YouTube – and shouldn’t have to login to see the stream, at least on YouTube.

The downside of a Google+ HOA is that you can’t set up a URL that you can promote in advance.  We have to wait until we go live this afternoon here to have a URL we can publicize.  So instead we have to tell people to watch our Google+ page and YouTube channel… which is okay but not ideal.

How You Can Help – Show Us It’s IPv6

We’d like to prove that today’s live stream is going out over IPv6… but we’re here at PLNOG on a IPv4 network, so we have no way of knowing.   What we’d love is if some of you out there who are running the IPvFoo or IPvFox browsers add-ons/extensions could capture some screenshots and let us know as a reply to a post on our Google+ page. What I am looking for is something like this:

Googleplus-ipv6.jpg

That can show which of the various connections are using IPv6.

If you are interested in helping, please monitor this post on our Google+ page so that you can see if others have already sent some in.  We would appreciate several different screenshots (but we don’t need 100! :-) ).

And if it turns out that we don’t see any streaming over IPv6… well… it will be worth the attempt – and we will figure this out eventually!

The Technical Setup

For those curious, I’m using a Canon Vixia camera connected via HDMI to a Blackmagic Intensity Extreme box that connects into my MacBook Pro.  On my MBP I’m running Wirecast software as an encoder that will then broadcast out to Google+.  I also have a Logitech HD webcam ready as a standby.  I have a feed coming into my camera from the house audio so that I’m getting the event microphones.  I’m then monitoring the audio from headphones connected to my MBP.

And, being paranoid about ensuring I capture the content, I’m recording the video stream locally on my MBP as a backup.

We’ll see… let the grand experiment begin in about 3.5 hours…

Sep 30

FIR #723 – 9/30/13 – For Immediate Release

FIR On Strategy episode 1 is up; Speakers and Speeches podcast on social visual communication is up; Scoble-Israel interview coming on Tuesday; FIR mobile app available for three platforms; Quick News: Pinterest introduces article pins, self-publishing could become a $52 billion business, Klout introduces Cinch, Lloyd's List goes digital-only; Ragan promo; News That Fits: Six lessons for content marketers from digital-first magazine leaders, Michael Netzley's Asia report, marketers lack confidence in their own digital abilities, Media Monitoring Minute from CustomScoop, listener comments, GE launched Ideas Lab with content from Atlantic Media Strategies, Dan York's report, Wave 7 survey results; music from KA Morton; and more.