Case study Priest wants to use my broadband to stream masses

C

Chelseablue

Registered User
Messages
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Hi all,
I wonder can any tech guys advise on this one.

We live in a rural area and our house it next door to the local church. The other evening the priest call in and spoke to my wife about the possibly of using our broadband to stream the masses in the church to local area for people who may be sick or elderly,

I would like to help out but are there any pitfalls or problems about using home broadband for this purpose.

Btw. Our broadband service is not good at the best of times,


Thanks for your reply’s


Regards
 
It may use up all your allowance.

How many masses? How long? How does he propose to stream etc.?
 
I think it would only be one mass per week on Sunday.

Would say 1 hour per week eat up much data?
 
Ravima said:
If you've unlimited use, then it will cost you nothing.
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And a very charitable thing to do, the OP will be blessed with the offering . Otherwise the priest will have to pay line rental, broadband charges etc which really wouldn't be worth it for one or two masses a week.
 
.........................but to those who would view, it would be worth it.
 
Are you kidding or what give him number of your broadband supplier and tell him get his own you wouldn't know what that lad would be at
 
1) It may be outside the T&Cs of your broadband contract to let someone else use it.

2) How will your connection be accessed from the church? Are you going to just let them get on your wifi? So if anything dodgy ever gets done by someone else on your connection you will not be able to plead innocence. Informal agreements tend to be forgotten about -- one day it's just for streaming one service a week, the next the local bridge club are watching the world championships at your expense.

3) You say your connection is dodgy most of the time. Most broadband connections are asymmetric so if your download speed is dodgy your upload may be even more so. You will need perhaps 4 megabits per second of reliable upload bandwidth to stream hi-def video, less for lower quality. It would be comparable to youtube download figures [broken link removed], just remember the figures are megaBYTES so multiply by 8 for megabits. You should start with a speed test.

I'd be all for helping someone out, but the implications need to be thought through.
 
The distance between the buildings and through the walls may be a problem.
You would be better getting a long cable to connect directly, as that would be more reliable.
 
SBarrett said:
You could see a Father Ted episode coming out of this
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Wouldn't you just love to hear the homily about doing the right thing, respecting the property of others, being good citizens, etc., etc.?
 
To upload an hour of sd quality youtube video would be about 500mb.

Dan Murray said:
Is this legal? ethical?
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OP sharing his internet connection with a neighbor might be against his ISP's terms of service. If he accepted payment, then it definitely would be against TOS.
Is breaking such a clause in a private contract "illegal"? The worst possible consequence would be that the ISP could withdraw their service.

Is this immoral? If you really wanted to, you could look at this as the church stealing service from the ISP. I wouldn't cast the first stone - I've stolen lots of media/services with my internet connection, for more selfish reasons.

For the sake of the two old dears who'd like to watch these videos, I'd be happy to go along if I was in OP's shoes. Provided somebody in the parish is savvy enough to set it up and maintain it - you don't want to get suckered into becoming unpaid parish IT support. I'd give the designated person the password to my guest wifi network, make an agreement about fair use, and how/when to contact you when they need your intervention.
 
Isn't the priest going to have to spend some money on a camera, website, etc?
 
I assume this is audio only, what the priest could possibly do is get the mass recorded, then get it up on some site - itunes, google drive, maybe a youtube channel, so it could be available an hour or so after the mass as a podcast.

Technically I think it would be a bit easier and much more reliable than live streaming. Also it wouldn't be relying on local broadband for the downloads. You just need local broadband to upload it, but a 3g phone could do that for a 5Mb to 50Mb audio file.

A local radio station would also be happy to help by hosting the file as it would send traffic to their website, but mightn't be the most reliable for getting the file available for download on a Sunday morning.
 
Does the priest actually know what's involved in the whole process?

I've been thinking this over again. Every priest I know has their own home broadband. I like the idea of uploading the recording for the person at home to listen back to. Saying that, just a 30 minute recording would take hours upon hours to upload on an ordinary home connection.

Unless the priest has a tech savvy person advising him I reckon he's on a loser.

Does the Parish have a website etc.? The more it has, the more tech savvy your priest.
 
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