First Look at New SL Streaming Service Bright Canopy

Bright Canopy, the Second Life streaming service aiming to become SL Go's much-needed successor, had a pre-launch event today, and thanks to founder Bill Glover, I got to join the sneak peek. It's still very early days for the service, with all the kinks still being worked out, so read my brief review with that in mind.

TL;DR version: Pretty impressive and relatively economical - if you have really good wi-fi/broadband and you're close to San Francisco and/or a Canopy-connected server.

First the best points: It's optimized to run best on Google Chrome, which for my money, is the best browser on the market. Loading and launch times were pretty fast for me - under a minute. As with SL Go, you get to choose between Firestorm (the most popular 3rd party SL viewer) or the official viewer, another big plus. And the first time I launched, I loaded quickly into a great high-res view of my office (which frankly, I have hardly visited since, well, since SL Go went defunct).

Potential downsides? The $0.79/hr price is probably a bit on the high side for power SL users (and a lot costlier than SL Go's "all you can eat" pricing plans). But I'd expect that price to go down if the company started gaining more subscribers and scaling well. Also, and this might just reflect unique problems with my own system, but it seems like you need a really powerful broadband connection to pull this off:

Note the system message in the screenshot above which indicates my wi-fi connection isn't adequate. (Supposedly I have 78 MBPS, but I'm roughly 100% sure my computer is lying to me about that.) I also got another dialog message saying that I'm over 1000 miles from the nearest server, which is sort of strange, as I'm in Los Angeles, less than 400 miles from San Francisco or Bright Canopy's Silicon Valley server. Consequently, after a few seconds of good performance, the whole program stuttered to a halt.

But like I said, very early days, with much to improve, and much user feedback (on top of mine) to take into account. If you've tried Bright Canopy, please share your own experiences below.

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Comments

[Sean Heying]

Personally I would not be trusting this.

1. It's a wordpress site, not an actual official company site with address and contact details, bushiness registration and so on.

2. It looks like it will run in your browser as a plugin, this can cause all sorts of technical issues and extra resource use.

3. You will be giving them your name and password. With all the hacks about and people losing control of their account do you really wish to provide your account login details, your chat logs, access to your credit card and/or paypal to an unknown?

From the site :

'Security is a reasonable concern with any online service...At Bright Canopy, we also have access to install things on the machine running the viewer....it’s worth remembering that our founder is a bearded Unix guy...do our very best to protect your information.'

[Bill Glover]

Thanks for sharing your experience. This is, as you said, an early-access preview, and there are a couple of things in the tips I sent out about network issues as Firestorm loads inventory for the first time. It's just really aggressive and efficient and can degrade the network performance between the client and the server until it's cached. We had folks as far away as Scotland doing very well today. I hope you get a chance to try it again.

For launch we plan to be more distributed, but Pre lLaunch is just hosted in California.

Sean, I can understand your skepticism, after all, We're only a month old startup and and we're moving fast. I switched from a simple Skeleton (similar to bootstrap) static site and went with WordPress because we wanted a blog for communication and transparency and because it was easier to find people who understand it rather than throwing up another proprietary blog built on a bootstrap theme on top of nodejs. Watch for much improvement when the website becomes a priority.

I hope I addressed the security question in the same part of the FAQ you quoted, but it boils down to this:

Here is who I am, and I am accountable for user privacy and security.

https://linkedin.com/in/billglover

We will maintain procedures to protect your information. Just as Frame and Amazon have procedures to do the same. That's really all you get from any company no matter how fancy the website or how large the employee base.

Look for much more at launch including monthly plans.

We look forward to serving you and making SL and other virtual worlds available to as many people as possible.

[Bill Glover]

Sorry, Sean, I realize I missed a point there. There's no plugin involved.

[Ronnie North]

Why no lab support or firestorm support as before?
Will the lab give its blessing as before?

[Bill Glover]

Hi Ronnie, Both Lindend Labs and the Phoenix Firestorm Project have lent a tremendous amount of help testing the beta and have offered valuable advice. Neither has officially endorsed Bright Canopy, but then, we haven't even launched yet. It's reasonable to expect us to earn it.

Separate issue. I beleive we have found the performance issue that effected Hamlet and some other users. We are working on a fix now. Watch @BrightCanopyApp for status on the fix.

[Mantas]

It's more likely that you have a 70 Mbps WiFi link, not a 70 MB/s one. (Just clarifying the "MBPS" here.)

And with WiFi, the expected data transfer speed is usually at most half the link speed, so SpeedTest generally will give you ~40 Mbps in this case.

(And that's for an 'ideal' unidirectional transfer – game streaming is more demanding in various other aspects far beyond my knowledge, and as long as WiFi has to deal with other devices on the same network or frequency, it won't be as reliable as a wired connection.)