Hi @Pine. Do you plan to work on this task (if so, please set yourself as assignee), or who is the target audience? Is this about WMF's Office IT? Wondering which project to associate to this task so someone could find this task...

I can imagine that replacements have been investigated and Hangouts and BlueJeans were the (current) results. Do you know if BlueJeans allows recording and later publishing on e.g. Commons and Youtube?

@Aklapper: I mostly have WMF Office IT in mind for this task, but it may be of interest to affiliates as well. The US Wikimedians are now using Zoom for our monthly meetings, and I am finding it to be more reliable than Hangouts. I believe that WMF has tested BlueJeans but I don't know what the outcomes of that testing were. I would also encourage WMF Office IT to test Zoom. I believe that the best person to be the task owner might be @bcampbell.

Do Zoom or BlueJeans provide a public streaming option like "Google Hangouts on Air" (broadcasting to Youtube)? My personal guess is that's the factor here...

Investigation already took place a year ago with the result that Blue Jeans is used by the WMF and Google Hangouts are also used.
@Pine: Are there specific reasons why do start a new investigation?

I feel that Google Hangouts is too buggy, so yes, there is a reason to investigate a replacement for it. It is possible that WMF could retain BlueJeans for internal use and replace public meetings with some other tool, whether that is BlueJeans, Zoom, or some other competitor.

I know that Zoom allows large live meetings including livestreaming by viewers, but I'm not sure if they can stream directly to Youtube or if all viewers need to install the Zoom app. I am waiting for information from their sales team about that.

Hey all,

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. In my experience, Google Hangouts is a good tool for day-to-day meetings and remote collaboration due to its ease of use and integration into other Google Apps. I also prefer Hangouts' echo cancellation codec to other services I've tried (BlueJeans and Zoom). Currently, WMF uses both Hangouts and BlueJeans, depending on the application.

Our main use case for BlueJeans is meetings with over 25 remote participants, and meetings that need to be recorded (but not necessarily streamed).

BlueJeans has the ability to stream to a large audience as a premium service, but I prefer to screen capture BlueJeans meetings with a capture card and then stream through YouTube Live to an unlimited audience.

FWIW, most audio problems in our live events are not the fault of the video conferencing software. For example, I am currently in the process of replacing our AV encoder hardware unit that has caused me countless headaches (I'm waiting on an RMA from our vendor, but hopefully I will get it replaced within a couple of weeks). Additionally, the audio problems in the August 2016 Research Showcase were mostly the fault of using a speakerphone in a broadcast application. I've talked to the Research team, and we will present a better solution next time.

Thanks for explaining!

Proposing to decline this task as per last comment.

Audio issues/problems were already explained in T143247#2572009?

Brendan's previous explanation was about audio echoes. My question from my previous post is about dropped audio.

Hey Pine,

FWIW, all folks here have a Blue Jeans account, so all are welcome to use Blue Jeans when they please, and one does not need an account to join a meeting as a guest. I find Hangouts to be a reliable tool, while I do admit that speakerphones occasionally fail and need to be restarted. Additionally, Hangouts on Air can be pretty buggy, at times (Hangouts streamed to YouTube).

I have recently been practicing using OBS (open source stream encoding software) to encode streams directly to YouTube Live, bypassing the need for Hangouts on Air. I have found that OBS gives me more control over the technical details, and also provides a more reliable stream. I look forward to using OBS for the next Metrics meeting.

I appreciate the feedback and look forward to continuing to improve the quality of our videoconferencing. I also do like Zoom and perhaps we will sign on with them next summer when our Blue Jeans contract expires.

Thanks,
Brendan