Tech advice for live Buddhist broadcasting

I wonder if the mods would allow a topic discussing technologies for live broadcasting. I know quite a few Dhamma centers are trying to switch to on-line broadcasts and I was hoping to benefit from other peoples advice. I have some experience with Facebook Live, but that’s not a very open platform.

Could people share any advice they have? Youtube? Periscope? Shoutcast? Mixler?

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Sounds like a good Watercooler topic. :blush:

Zoom? Tho I don’t think it’s much good for public broadcasting it is excellent for large and small discussions and allows for breakout groups.

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We use Zoom down here for seminars and discussions.

If you don’t pay for a license you can talk forever one-to-one, but if there are more connections you are limited to 40 minutes and 100 participants. This would be fine for many purposes.

We have a corporate license and rooms set up with cameras, etc, but it works fine on phones or laptops.

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I’d much rather have cool non-evil service, but we went with YouTube because our friend Damith, who has been curating a set of mostly my talks and teachings for many years now, has a substantial list of subscribers. You need over 1,000 subscribers to do streaming from a phone.

The interface is confusing and we haven’t really worked it out. The time for the live event is different on different devices, and it seems the desktop version and mobile app don’t always talk to each other very well. But so far as I can tell, it seems to work ok.

Bandwidth is of course a problem, the internet definitely is slower these days.

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Sadu x 3 to Venerables Sujato and Vimala for their digital efforts.

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Ahhhh! that answers a question I had.
I was actually surprised you were using youtube, but that makes sense.

I have experience with spacial.com. They are a internet radio service. It’s inexpensive and fairly reliable. You can see a Dhamma radio station that uses it here: https://www.serenecolombo.org/radio/ . This station is mostly scheduled pre-recorded things, but because of the virus thing they are hoping to start more live things.

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I’d rather use a paid service than have YouTube’s ads all over the place TBH.

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We have paid for Zoom otherwise it would be undoable. Still I’m a bit worried about the slower internet nowadays especially since we are on a mobile router only in the monastery. We will see how it goes on Friday.

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Dear Ayya, is it possible for Tilorien to ask for a bandwidth update? Which Belgian provider is the monastery using? You’ll most probably need it the upcoming weeks. Let us know in case we can help.

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Thanks Teresia but there is no fixed line in the village. Everything is over Orange Flybox 4G.

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Perhaps one T.M. mole might be glad to dig you a ------------------- :electric_plug: to Bastogne?

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Just a reminder for folks, it is easy to branch off in a private conversation by clicking the three dot icon and then the flag icon.


The first option is to contact the poster directly.

It doesn’t have to be used for actual problematic content. It can just be for personal communication that doesn’t add to the public thread.

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Or see this PSA: Easily communicate with the poster by flagging

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On the user-end, to deal with the nearly inescapable monstrosity that is YouTube: there is the glorious https://invidio.us/.

It’s just a front-end, but quite feature-packed, cutting out many of the worst parts of YT. Personally, I use a browser plug-in to redirect all youtube URLs to invidious.
RE: The Trending Channel, you can change that and a few other things, here: https://invidio.us/preferences

https://github.com/omarroth/invidious/blob/master/README.md

Also, no tracking.

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btw, there’s also a cross-platform desktop client using the Invidious API: FreeTube.

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