rgreig

1080p at 60fps requires bandwidth of approximately 11Mb. That is achievable even on 4G let alone fibre. For comparison, at my home with BT fibre I am getting about 80Mb upload (based on a speed test - BT claim a higher theoretical bandwidth). I cannot understand why we cannot get this right. Morton got a lot of things right last week in terms of the coverage but I don't think their frame rate was great. At the time I thought it was not great, and the highlights were only 25fps. For live sports, the key thing is getting a good frame rate. They need to focus on this first and once they have resolved that they can look at camera position, number of cameras and other aspects.

For the first 15 minutes, the stream was appalling. They restarted it and it improved considerably for a while, then late in the second half it was very poor again. It is hard to understand why we cannot stream 1080p at 60 frames per second. If they could just get that technical aspect right it would make such a difference. I agree with those who have said that they have had long enough to sort that out. I thought the cameraman (or woman) did OK given a very poor position and a camera that clearly struggled in poor light. They really need to get another couple of cameras as well. I can understand why some people would be asking for refunds - while I have no issue with the quality of the camera work, there is no excuse for basic technical issues. As for the game itself, a draw was a fair result. We were poor going forward but defensively looked a lot more solid than last week. Dunfermline are clearly far stronger than last season and will do well. I think Cameron should have been brought on sooner - Anderson was frustrated again this week.

I don't know anything about the ground around the stadium, but if putting cables under the ground isn't possible it really isn't very expensive to run a point to point radio link, particularly considering you could guarantee line of sight. For example, a Unifi Building to building bridge costs under £400 and would give you a link speed greater than 1Gbps - clearly far more than the fibre upload speed. That is assuming the camera does actually need to be close to the external networking point. I think for yesterday, the main issue was software related due to it not being able to distinguish between a bald head and a football!

This game really showed the limitations of the Pixellot system. The developers had never thought that a bald linesman could cause such problems for their ball tracking algorithm, but having no human to override it made it an awful experience generally. The resolution and framerate were good, which shows that every club should be able to get that right, but when the camera misses large amounts of action it becomes just as frustrating as a buffering stream. I can only hope that they are using the data from the matches to train their algorithm to be more effective The biggest drawback of the Pixellot system is that there are no replays and the camera is always quite far from the action. Even if they fix the ball tracking they can't fix that. I initially thought that the commentator was OK but it was clear after 10 minutes that he didn't really know anything about either team or indeed football. I think it's a tough gig for someone to host a match on their own though. He clearly had prepared lots of statistics and information that he could recite about individual players, but he badly needed an ex-pro beside him to provide analysis. I think if Inverness paid for one of their former players to join him it would improve it a lot, I wouldn't just sack him (yet). I thought we looked OK defensively for most of the game so it was such a poor goal to lose. I also don't think McCowan has to worry about not getting his place back.

It certainly has better resolution and frame rate than the AUMedia offering. I also prefer the camera angle. But the inaccuracy in tracking the ball is a major issue with the platform so I can see why we chose to do something different. I don't understand why AUMedia are struggling to stream at 1080p. I also think that in an otherwise empty stadium they could get some cherry pickers from our vice-chairman to provide an more elevated view. Even resolving just one of these would significantly improve the coverage. We get to try Pivellot again tomorrow. I assume they are also working on improving the tracking.

For the stream, can you give details on how you were watching (e.g. browser, device, casting?). There is no reason why any club cannot provide a decent stream - while things like the skill of the camera operators (and number of cameras) are very important and hard do well, it should be feasible for everyone to get a stream that does not buffer or freeze. It would be interesting to know how many of our season ticket holders live at the same address - e.g. if we sold 500 tickets do we only have 300 unique households?

It was very poor trying to cast on Chromecast (froze every few seconds) but fine when watching on a laptop on a browser. Definitely appeared to be a lower framerate - not sure why they would need to do that though given the resolution is not 4K. I'd be interested to hear if anyone was able to get it to cast to chromecast well. I think the commentary is the best of the matches I have watched (i.e. all the Ayr games so far) but the quality of the stream (resolution/framerate) the worst by some distance. Albion was frustrating because the camera didn't track the ball but the video stream was decent. Hamilton had a very good set up technically (and benefited from the height of the cameras which gave an excellent perspective). As for the game, if the sign of a good team is that it can still win while playing poorly, then Ayr is a truly great team.

The issues were almost certainly not related to people's internet connections or the time at which they tried to join the feed.

I was watching on Chrome (on Windows) and it was unwatchable. I also cast via a chromecast which was the same. In the second half I think they dropped the frame rate which improved the freezing a bit, but still made it a very poor experience. I expect that based on the responses I can see that this should be relatively easy for them to fix. iOS devices will be viewing the HLS encoding whereas it was MPEG-DASH for others (e.g. on Android or Windows). So the issue is likely to be with how they are transcoding it - e.g. trying to transcode locally rather than leveraging a cloud service or having some of the parameters set up incorrectly. But nothing that someone who understands this could not resolve very easily. I thought having multiple cameras was a good idea but they really need to ensure that the white colour balance is calibrated across all cameras so that it doesn't look like amateur hour when they switch cameras. Also they need to improve stabilisation on some of them (e.g. surely they were using gimballs on all of them but it didn't look like it). I thought the commentary was good and it was essential given the issues with the freezing. Overall, I think if they can resolve the basic issues they could build on it and offer a good service with multiple camera angles and replays in future.

I think the problems with the streaming service last night were with the authentication and authorisation components rather than the streaming itself. I tried to log in at around 7pm and did have some issues then but by about 7.05 I had managed to join. From that point the streaming itself was fine with a good frame rate (although not amazing resolution) and I didn't experience any freezes or degradation. I cast it to my TV using a chromecast which worked very well. I run a major online investments platform and it is really difficult to find people with the right skills to be able to build and run this kind of service which needs to be able to scale to deal with significant peaks of demand. But given the issues did not appear to be with the streaming video - which is by far the harder problem to solve and one where you need to leverage existing services to have any chance of doing a good job - I expect they will be able to fix it for the next matches. I would be interested to see what level of demand they saw last night and how that compared with their forecasts - I would cut them some slack given the budget they are likely working within. With our friendly against Partick I noticed there were nearly 2000 live viewers at one point which really surprised me. How many viewers is AUMedia expecting us to have for our matches? By far the more annoying aspect was the fact that the ball tracking was not great and it really struggled to keep up with the action. I also felt really sorry for the commentators who didn't have replays to fill in time! For pricing, I think that a tenner is a reasonable price for a PPV at our level but I assume some clubs have done market research to set the level to maximise revenue. I think the club should consider giving season ticket holders a discount on *next* year's ticket for each match that is streamed this season, at a value that makes the price slightly less than the PPV (e.g. cost equivalent of £9 if they set the price at £10 for PPV). Announcing that now could really boost cashflow. I thought we did very well and could have scored more, albeit against poor opposition. Really encouraging and I'm really looking forward to Saturday.

This may be obvious to everyone else, but are season ticket holders with stand seats supposed to be able to purchase tickets for those seats for the cup tie online? If so, it's certainly not the most intuitive process! If I login to the tickets site, it then asks me if I want to buy tickets for the St Johnstone tie. Click yes, and it then gives me an option to pick a seat. There are seats in green which are marked as "member seats" but it doesn't seem to recognise which one is mine and when I click on it it just pops up a dialog saying that "this seat is already reserved to another member". Is this supposed to work or do I just choose the path of least resistance and purchase another random stand seat? I am also trying to buy a ticket for my daughter (who is a child therefore does not have a credit card of her own) who is also a season ticket holder but I have no idea whether the system has any concept of linked accounts or if this requires multiple independent transactions. Or even a phone call.

Yes, I cannot understand why people are looking for problems with this new system when in fact it is moving us ahead of other clubs. The club should be applauded for investing in it. Surely it is football that has been an anachronism, with fans directly handing over cash to turnstile operators? When you go the cinema you don't hand over your cash to someone standing outside Screen 4 - you buy the ticket in advance (which can be online, or at a kiosk in the building). Same with music concerts. You can pay with cash in all these cases if you want, but you can also offer other payment methods very easily. The country has seen "peak cash" as described in this article and it is great that our club is supporting greater choice in how we purchase our tickets. The system has other advantages for all fans - giving special offers such as price reductions to mid-week fixtures for those attending on a Saturday become far easier to do administratively, as does handling rare scenarios such as games postponed after kick-off due to bad weather and so on. I don't know how well the system the club has purchased supports these scenarios of course, but the technology certainly enables it in principle. The technology is only one part of it however, and I do hope that the club has thought through the logistics carefully so that it doesn't get a bad reputation on day 1.