Bright Canopy, the planned new streaming service for Second Life and OpenSim, hosted its first user group meeting on Saturday, April 25th.
The meeting drew interested parties and beta testers from SL and OpenSim, and was hosted by Bright Canopy founder, Bill Glover (known in-world as Chaos Priestman). As Bright Canopy will be running on technology provided by Frame (who are putting considerable effort into helping to get the service up-and-running and ensuring it can meet users’ expectations), they were represented at the meeting by Carsten Puls (Carsten at Frame in SL).
Held in text chat to allow those running on SL Go to join the session, the meeting was mainly focus on questions and answers to give people a chance to learn what they wanted to learn about the service, and ran to just over an hour.
The notes from the meeting have now been posted on the Bright Canopy website. Rather than presenting a formal transcript (because some questions were asked a number of times), the meeting notes group questions and answers in to subject groups.
While those interested in potentially moving to Bright Canopy when it does launch should read the notes directly in order to get the most complete picture of things, I’m providing a high-level key point summary below from the major topics discussed (note questions were asked about supporter viewers, please refer to the meeting notes for these):
When will Bright Canopy be ready?
- Bright Canopy is in closed beta, right now. The plan is to move to an invitation-only pre-launch as soon as possible, to allow for more widespread testing; when this happens depends on getting a few more technical issues dealt with and sorting management and billing issues
- Bright Canopy is like SL Go, but accessed via a web browser. Initially, for the pre-launch this will be Chrome, but support for other browsers will be there for the launch. Essentially, if your device can run a modern browser and is capable of viewing a streamed video, you should be good to go
- Bright Canopy will provide the service, Frame will managed the underlying technology and Groove will provide support assistance
- Bright Canopy will initially be hosted in the USA. However, Frame utilises Amazon WAS G2 servers, so the aim is to support Bright Canopy as widely as possible. Frame already utilises Amazon data centres in Ireland, Tokyo, Sydney, Singapore, as well as both the east and west coasts of the USA
- There may still be legal restrictions that prevent people in some countries from using the service (as we the case with Germany and SL Go); these will be looked into
- In terms of connectivity, a bandwidth of at least 3 Mbps is required and latency of under 100 ms
- Pricing is not currently available. The idea is to make the service as cost-effective as possible while obviously meeting the costs involved in supplying the service
- Stripe is being used for back-end payment processing
- Payment options will initially be credit card and bitcoin for the pre-launch. linden dollars will be added after pre-launch, and PayPal may be offered as well.
For the rest, as noted above, please refer to the Bright Canopy blog.
If you have any questions on the service, please be sure to ask them on the Bright Canopy blog, not here, so that they can be fully addressed.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
I’m wondering what latency is meant to measure. They expect 100 ms maximum.
Here in the UK, just the ping time is likely to be more than that. It’s an imperfect measure of time for any packet to be transmitted across the internet. It’s one thing if latency is just the server-end delays, but that’s hardly something I can control. The Stats window in SL just seems to lump it all together. I can’t do anything about the trans-Atlantic wet string.
So what are they really talking about and it there anything anyone else can do (besides shutting down other programs such as browsers)?
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