Internet Problems Plague Showcase

October 25, 2020 • Addison Ching • Festivals and Conventions

The Hawaiian Steel Guitar Showcase featuring Jeff Au Hoy and Bobby Ingano was interrupted during the live broadcast when technicians observed that the quality of the upstream Internet connection had degraded to unsatisfactory levels.

The video portion of the broadcast was most affected, characterized by intermittent screen freezing. A check of the upstream bandwidth showed that it had degraded below minimum thresholds to maintain a quality broadcast. It is not known what caused the degradation.

The live broadcast began intermittently freezing during Jeff Au Hoy's performance and was eventually suspended when technicians discovered that the upstream bandwidth had fallen to a little over 1mbps. A quality HD video broadcast requires at least 5mbps bandwidth to stream uninterrupted.

While technicians worked to resolve the problem, the musical presentation continued although it could not be streamed via Facebook. As with every broadcast, the entire event is recorded locally for archive backup. The entire recorded event has been uploaded to the Showcase's Facebook page as an archived event and is now available for viewing.

Event producers are working to identify the source of the problem and determine alternatives to minimize impacts on future broadcasts.