Setting Up Playback (Overage) Protection on Dacast: A Walkthrough

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What is Playback Protection?

Playback protection is an added feature you can set up on your Dacast account. This feature ensures you will never run out of bandwidth in the middle of a live stream.

Essentially, “playback protection” is another name for “overage protection” that guarantees that your account remains active and that your streams never go dark.

When you enable playback protection, Dacast automatically adds a predetermined amount of GB whenever your account runs out.

How to Setup Playback Protection:

To add or enable this feature, first log in to your Dacast account.

First option

Click on the “Account” tab on the menu on the left-hand side of your dashboard. Under “Plan” you will see the following page.

Second option

Upon logging into your Dacast account, you will see as well on the dashboard, the data indicator. Apart from showing how much data is still remaining, you will see the Playback Protection tab there as well. You can also enable it from that tab and it will redirect you to the Data GB purchase window. Simply click on the gear icon.

Moving along to the actual purchase window for the corresponding GB you want to enable:

Going forward, this is the amount of bandwidth that Dacast will automatically add to your account in the event you run out. Once that selection has been made, please click on “Enable” at the bottom to save your preferences.

You will be given an option to purchase up to 5000 GB (minimum 50 GB) worth of data. So anytime your data reaches 0 GB, the system will automatically purchase the amount of data which you have pre-chosen. It costs only 30 cents per GB. So in the example above 50GB would cost $15.00.

The following message will appear to confirm that it was saved:

Now apart from enabling this feature, we have also added another layer of notification, in connection to this.

There is an option to enable a feature wherein Dacast will automatically send a notification email (the email associated with your Dacast account) and advise you beforehand that you are running out of data. The threshold is at 10%. So anytime your data falls below its 10% capacity, you will get this notification.

Simply go to the Account tab and choose Profile. Scroll down below and you will see email notifications. The 2nd option, Low Data, is what will give you that option to enable or disable.

This is particularly useful if you forgot to enable the playback protection feature on your account OR if you simply want to edit the data and choose a higher figure if you so wish.

Setting Up a Payment Method

Adding a payment method is the second part of the overage protection setup. If you are already on a monthly plan, chances are you already have a payment method on file.

You can click “Account” then “Billing” to update and add a payment method of your choice:

Next, you will see this screen where you can “Edit Payment Method”:

Please note that due to a system analytics delay, you might receive the bill two to three hours after you have run out.

This will not impact your streaming. You will continue to broadcast during these two to three hours while the analytics catch up.

If you are wondering how much video bandwidth you’ll need for your streaming needs, please check out our bandwidth calculator.

Any questions or you want to access this feature? Please contact us.

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Additional Resources

Jose Guevara

Jose is a part of the Dacast Customer Onboarding team and started working with the company in 2016. He has vast experience in customer service/engagement and live streaming support.