ConferenceXtra

The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform have asked ConferenceXtra to film and stream the Digital Britain Summit tomorrow from the British Library. It’s a star-studded line-up with CEO’s of the major telecoms and media players. Tickets are long sold out so the live stream is the only option in town.

Visit www.digitalbritainforum.org.uk to see the feed.

UPDATE - 17/4/09 11.17:

There were some technical issues this morning with the live feed which have now been resolved.

This is what happened.  The British Library installed a dedicated BT line for use by the video feed.  At 7.30am that was working fine.  At 8.30 it was working fine.  At 8.50 the upload bandwidth seemed to drop from 400kbs to 90kbs which is insufficient for live streaming.

We made changes to our set-up to allow for the lower bandwidth, but it didn’t solve the problem.  The British Library then switched our connection over to their main connection.  Unfortunately this didn’t solve the problem because our primary encoder did not revert to the original settings.  We switched to our back-up encoder and that has been performing fine since 10.45.  We’re really sorry that those of you who tried to access the stream this morning were unable too.

Shane McCracken from ConferenceXtra partner, Gallomanor, was recently engaged to project manage G20Voice, a group of 50 bloggers given access to the G20 London Summit.

More to follow.

The aim of ConferenceXtra is to turn conferences inside out so that people who were unable to attend an event can still join in the conversations and information sharing that took place at the venue.

It is appropriate then that the first official ConferenceXtra production was for the evoice third International Political Forum on eDemocracy. You can see it at http://evoice.conferenceXtra.org.

There was a wide variety of presentations and networking at the forum which presented us with challenges. The majority of presentations and Q&A took place in one room but the workshop sessions used a further three rooms spread out across the Maid’s Head Hotel and on the Friday the whole conference upped stick and took a coach across Norfolk to a school in Kings Lynn and to Snettisham Parish Council.

We used a team of four to capture the conference. Gavin and Abbie handled the video capture using a HD Sony Z1 for tripod work and a Sony compact handheld for the mini-interviews. Using four Olympus digital audio recorders and a Nikon D4 we were able to capture the presentations and upload them to the site in near-real-time. Dave handled uploading and blogging and by the end of the day all the presentations were online followed shortly over the weekend by the rest of the video.

Highlights include CivicSurf participant Cllr Fran Pitt-Pladdy reflecting on his blogging activities, the students from Park High School communicating their passion for the BusStop39 project and Cllr Mary Reid giving her take on eDemocracy as a local politician in South West London.