Here are some technical updates on this weekend’s General Conference broadcasts:

The watch live page is now available at http://lds.org/general-conference/watch. The countdown will start approximately ½ hr before the sessions start and that will flow into the live event. The Church is streaming live HD video this conference. (Last conference we ended up not having HD available at the last minute for live streaming.) Also, in addition to English, Spanish, Portuguese, and ASL, the Church is also streaming French live through the LDS Media Player for the first time this conference. Previously, French had only been available as a Windows Media stream.

The listen live page is also now ready at http://lds.org/general-conference/live/listen. The Church is streaming 64 languages live.

Users of the Mormon Channel will be able to listen live on the iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Android, etc.

This conference will also have live streaming to iOS devices (iPad, etc.) so users who navigate to LDS.org on these devices will be able to view the live stream. We have noticed an issue with iOS 4.3x that was released a few weeks ago. After pressing the play button, please wait a few seconds while it loads and then it should play. While it is loading, please don’t press the center play button again or the one that will show up in the corner. This just happens on 4.3x. Several people have looked into this and we will continue to follow-up on this after conference.

We experienced some caching issues during the live streaming of last week’s General Young Women Meeting. These problems have now been fixed. If you saw either of the following two things happen last weekend on your iOS device you shouldn’t see them happen this weekend: (1) you didn’t see the player on the live watch page until a little while into the broadcast or (2) you started playing the broadcast and then the video jumped to the countdown that played before the broadcast and then back again and continued doing this randomly.

The live video stream of the event will be available right after each broadcast ends. Audio in 70+ languages will be available on the LDS.org conference site and on the Mormon Channel in iTunes within 8 hrs of the broadcast. Video in 12 languages will start trickling in after that and will fill in completely within 24 hrs of the broadcast (full session & talk/song segments) on conference.lds.org, podcasts, iTunes, and YouTube.

It is really exciting to see the Church using some new technologies and processes to improve the availability of General Conference. There are some very dedicated people making this happen!

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