Subject: Proposal to discontinue live mp3 audio streams at IETF meetings

From: Robert Sparks <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 1 Oct 2020 09:31:49 -0500

We propose to discontinue producing live mp3 audio streams for IETF 
meetings,
starting with IETF 109 and we want to hear from the community before we do.

At many past meetings we have produced live mp3 streams for each 
session. These
steams have been associated with physical meeting rooms, and appeared before
and during the session as a link on the agenda page to a URL like
'http://mp3.conf.meetecho.com/ietf/ietf<some_number_associated_with_the_room>.m3u'. 

For the last several meetings, these have only been available as a live 
stream.
Recordings of that stream have not been made available after the 
meeting. The
full video recording provided by Meetecho has served as the way to listen to
(or watch) any given session after the fact.

Further, for the last several meetings, the live streams have seen very 
light
use, on the order of 10 uses for IETF 108.

Now that we are holding more meetings online, we have a requirement to allow
meetings to run outside their scheduled times. Allowing the live streams 
to run
outside their scheduled times will require changing how they are 
represented,
to no longer be associated with "rooms" or "tracks". The code refactor 
at both
the datatracker and at meetecho to support would not be a huge effort, 
but it
also would not be tiny. Instead, we feel that removing this complexity,
recognizing that the regular meetecho connection and recordings satisfy the
need, is the better use of our resources. That holds true even for future
in-person meetings.

There are several points that have been considered while arriving at this
proposal:

* Chairs use the recordings to fill in minutes.

     For the last several meetings, the chairs have been using the Meetecho
     recordings for this purpose. Recordings of the live mp3 streams haven't
     been available.

* Some participants (especially ADs) want to listen to more than one 
meeting at
   a time.

     Meetecho allows joining multiple sessions.

* Some participants may not have the bandwidth or a new enough computer 
to run
   meetecho.

     The use of the mp3 streams has been very low at the last several 
meetings.
     This population isn't using the mp3 streams to address the posited
     limitations.  If this is a     concern that some people think they 
will
     experience then we can look at asking Meetecho to allow sending only
     audio (muting all video).

* This removes a mechanism that allowed people to listen to a session in
   real-time without paying a registration fee.

    There will be ongoing discussion and tuning of the meeting registration
    structure. In the meantime, the fee waiver program is available and 
being
    improved.

Please send comments by 16 Oct 2020 either to [email-masked] or
directly to [email-masked].