FCC Commissioners' Meetings Streams Have Technical Issues

One positive thing is that "the closed captioning continues no matter what," even when the video doesn't work, emailed NARUC General Counsel Brad Ramsay. "It used to be if the stream froze and you opened another browser -- the newly opened browser would only include the closed captioning from time you opened the new browser." That seems to have been fixed in the past six months, he noted. We also got captioning even when the video froze. Ramsay has "been watching video streams for a long time (across administrations) and freezing of the video stream happens often."

For users, problems seemed worse for this meeting than with others in recent months that also had technical issues. Friday, Ramsay noted, it "caused me more problems that usual." We submitted a report of our experiences to the FCC audio/visual experts, and others said they reported the problem or at least considered doing so. By evening, we hadn't heard back. An FCC spokesperson declined to comment.

For Public Knowledge Senior Vice President Harold Feld, fcc.gov/live issues have "been happening with increasing frequency. We had this problem about a decade ago, and the FCC spent a bunch of money upgrading its capacity." Friday, there was "buffering and the audio goes silent and the video freezes," he added. "Sometimes it comes back again in a few seconds. At other times, I have to reload the page, wait for the page to reload, press play on the live feed, and wait several seconds for it to rejoin the live feed." It was "happening a lot today," the lawyer emailed. "Oftentimes at critical moments" in commissioners' statements, he added, consistent with other reports we received. Feld compared it to a "bad comedy routine that this is happening when the item is about network resiliency," one of the rulemakings adopted at the Friday meeting (see 2002280069).

High public interest in the meetings, with more people watching online, may have caused a capacity crunch that led to the glitches, stakeholders speculated. Feld suspects "we now have more people trying to stream the meetings than the system can handle. Between 5G and Net Neutrality and rural broadband becoming a big deal, I think many more people are trying to watch FCC meetings than in the past. ... That's a good thing. We should make it easier for them, not harder."

A variety of viewers had problems, and some tweeted their concern by linking it to policy issues, sometimes tongue in cheek. "Looks like someone forgot to pay the zero-rating bill," wrote Blake Reid, associate clinical law professor for areas including technology and telecom at University of Colorado-Boulder. Zero-rating is when broadband providers offer certain services without bandwidth limits that apply to other things. The academic was responding to a report of problems by R Street Institute Technology & Innovation Policy Resident Fellow Jeffrey Westling. Reid noted later that his tweet was in jest and that he hadn't watched the meeting online.

Westling deemed notable some issues. "The feed would constantly freeze or fail to refresh," he emailed. "We tried using different devices to see if that would resolve the issue, but unfortunately the problems persisted." Increased attention on the C-band item "may have caused some of the problem, as the stream seemed to work better as the meeting went on, though the problems never went away completely," the tech attorney said. Commissioners 3-2 adopted rules for auction of that spectrum (see 2002280005). Westling suggested the agency consider alternatives like an audio feed that may be easier to maintain than video, which typically uses more capacity.

Editor's note: This is one in a series of periodic articles about FCC IT issues affecting the public. Our recent report said the agency's main filing system wasn't posting documents for a few days. See 2001140047. To learn more about these problems, on Friday we filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking more details from the regulator.