It's amazing to think that this time last year, we had no live streaming. Since ospreys started to breed again in Wales in 2004, no live streaming of video from an osprey nest had occurred, and there's a very good reason for this. It is very, very difficult to do.

Ospreys don't nest in city centres (not in the UK anyway), like peregrines, or in man-made boxes, like owls and kestrels. By their very nature, ospreys tend to nest in remote places, often the more remote and nearer water the better. To put a camera and an electricity supply on a remote nest in the middle of nowhere with a main railway track in the way in extreme weather, and then stream that video at 24 frames per second to anyone with an internet connection, anywhere in the world, is a technological nightmare.

Who remembers this image from last year?

Network Rail kindly donated half a mile of super fibre-optic armoured cable to Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust last March, 2012. The search was on to find 100 volunteers for the day to pull two tonnes of this cable through Cors Dyfi, a wet peat bogland, under the railway track (Network Rail did that!) and then over to the nest.

On St. Davids Day last year, 108 volunteers from all corners of the UK kindly donated their time and helped us pull the cable from the visitor centre on the reserve all the way to the nest. We called the event "The Big Pull" and it made national headlines.

The race was then on to fit High Definition cameras on various perches in time for Monty and Nora's arrival. We managed to do this with just a couple of days spare - Nora was back extremely early, March 24th.

We opened the Dyfi Osprey Project three days later by which time we had configured the four HD cameras to NAS drives for recording and to live screens both in the visitor centre and the hide. The cable worked a treat.

Last few minutes before opening in 2012, Alwyn gives the TVs a good wipe while Nora looks on..

Live Streaming

Now the difficult part. To stream video from an osprey nest you need a camera, electricity, and a whole host of other technical bits and bobs. You also need a BT telephone line - this is where the problems start.

Again, by the very nature of osprey ecology, osprey nests tend not to have BT phone lines anywhere near them. Not only that, to stream video in High Definition you need super fast speeds, the kind of speeds we have recently seen being introduced in big cities; London, Manchester, Edinburgh, Cardiff, and the like. Not on our Derwenlas cabinet in rural mid Wales that services less than 100 customers!

Our electricity box underneath the osprey nest with all the networking and streaming gubbins

There is a work-around however, albeit expensive. Bonded DSL.

In simple terms, this means getting numerous BT lines and bonding these together so that the broadband speed of each is added together to make one big faster line. We could only get three BT lines, however, as the exchange in Derwenlas is already running at close to maximum. Once the three lines are bonded together, they are modulated so that we sacrifice a little download speed and gain upload speed. It's upload speed we need to send video out, and lots of it.

For the techies, with three BT lines bonded and modulated, we are achieving just over 2Mb/s. Still nowhere near enough to spurt out HD video. We finally got the Live Streaming going, the first in Wales, just as the chicks were hatching in June last year.

2012

This year we wanted to continue improving the Live Streaming. We have installed another camera and, for the first time, two professional quality microphones in the nest - right in the twigs underneath Monty's feet. Adding sound brings a new dimension to the experience of watching Monty go about his daily life, it also brings a whole new set of problems.

The audio streaming not only gives us a headache of more data to upload, it needs very careful modulating and configuring so that when one of Monty's girlfriends squeals at him for more fish, you hear it the nanosecond it happens. Not three seconds after.

Alwyn with one of the Sennheiser mics just before installation in last month

2013

In 2013 we wanted to introduce three new things to Live Streaming: The camera, the mics, and HTML 5.

HTML 5 is a very modern way of worldwide web communications that spans all devices that can access the internet. We wanted everybody with a PC, a Mac, a phone, a tablet, an iPad, a notebook, a laptop and so on, to be able to watch the Dyfi ospreys. Introducing audio and HTML 5 in a rural area without spending silly money is highly challenging.

We couldn't make all these changes and run them in parallel with the old system either. Even though we tested the new infrastructure and systems to the hilt for several weeks and ironed out several issues, it's only when we went live that you get a real measure of how successful the transition over to audio and HTML 5 has been.

That changeover happened just over a week ago. During that week we've received over 1,000 emails, questions, and phone enquiries regarding various issues - we now think we have sorted most of the problems out! The following is a brief summary of how to get the best experience on your particular device. This will be a fluid blog with many updates, but as of April 28th, here are a few notes of guidance/troubleshooting:

Viewing Tips
In very basic terms - the more modern your equipment, the better the Live Streaming is going to be. General rule of thumb - please try and update the latest software you are running to the current version. Because of HTML 5's multi-platform compatibility, all users will now just see one Play button in the middle of the video window. Press this to play.

PC - Live Streaming now works on PCs - it shouldn't matter what version of Windows you have. Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8 are fine. It does matter however, which browser you are using:

Internet Explorer - Live Streaming will not work with Internet Explorer 8 or older. It will work with IE 9 or the most current, IE 10.

Chrome - Live Streaming works well with the latest version

Firefox - Live Streaming works well with the latest version

Opera - Live Streaming works well with the latest version

Safari - Live Streaming works well with the latest version

Macs and iMacs

Live Streaming works well with the latest versions of all browsers including Safari (although full-screen does not work with some platforms)

iPads, iPods, iPhones
Issues have now been solved - Live Streaming works well with these devices, best results using Safari.

Android tablets and phones
Most issues relating to these platforms have been resolved. However we are aware of some people who are having difficulties still - we are still looking into this.

VERY IMPORTANT - If you are experiencing problems, please try shutting down your browser, or even your device/computer, and starting again to see if you can get the Live Streaming to work. Check back here over the next few days for updates.

Again, many thanks for your patience over the last week or so. We want to give you a phenomenal experience of the Dyfi ospreys whether you are on a train, in the car, in your caravan, in the pub, at work (ahem) or just sat at home. Doing all of these things is not easy. We have come a long way in less than 12 months and we will continue to try and improve month on month, year on year. I watched the live straming at dawn for two hours this morning and it was perfect with no flickering. In fact, the only thing that was flickering was Monty's nerves as his latest girlfriend was calling at him incessantly for more food.

As more people log on, currently more than 10,000 each day, the picture can stutter sometimes - it's all to do with bandwidth again and the lack of it in rural Wales. We will continue to work with BT, however, and upgrade our hardware to get this issue resolved.

And finally. Just when you think you have thought of absolutely everything, from placing the cameras so they don't point towards the sun and are at the exact angle relative to the nest for an unbelievable view, up comes an osprey and a bit of wind and places a nest twig at right angles, spoiling the view. What do they say, never work with children and animals!

Beautiful light - Monty and girlfriend No 2, Seren

Our aim at Montgomeryshire Wildlife Trust is to learn more about these wonderful birds. We want to make the experience of observing them the best we possibly can, which will help us do just that. The more we learn, the more we will understand about ospreys so that we can conserve and protect them in the future. They've had enough problems in the UK over the last 500 years. It's payback time.

Thank you to the 223 people that have donated so far, we are now almost half way to achieving our £10,000 target to pay for the Live Streaming this year. If you can donate and help us pay for the streaming, please do. It's dead simple and the donate button is on the Live Streaming page itself. Thank you - diolch yn fawr.