I'm also very pleased to see that, in the less than two days since I posted the Hugo Awards Ceremony video, it has been played 240 times and loaded (if not played all the way through) almost 2000 times. That includes the various embedded copies on different web sites.
Looking a little more closely at the UStream documentation, it's possibly that I might have been able to reduce the number of server failures by turning down the broadcast quality from "normal" to "low." Although I always had a good clear wireless signal within the auditorium, the sheer number of people using wireless devices in there may have been overloading the system, and UStream says that this can cause the broadcasts to stall and fail. I continue to appreciate the fact that nobody seems to have flamed us for the off-and-on nature of the video webcast and seems to have realized that it was a real shoestring, seat-of-the-pants, last-minute operation. If there hadn't been an consumer electronics store across the parking lot from the convention centre, we wouldn't have been able to throw it together at all!
Five years ago, we were quoted several thousand pounds to do live streaming from Glasgow. Today, the cost is dramatically lower. I hope that Reno and Chicago will be able to bring resources to bear to do something more official, possibly with a dedicated internet connection that isn't subject to the hazards of community wi-fi.