BGSU graduation to be shown on Internet for first time

The University's television station, WBGU-PBS, will produce and transmit live video streams for the Graduate College commencement ceremony on Friday (May 9) as well as the three undergraduate graduation ceremonies on Saturday (May 10). "

For many years now, WBGU-PBS has televised the different commencement ceremonies on campus and on local cable and made videotapes available for purchase to families who cannot travel to the ceremonies," says Patrick Fitzgerald, general manager of WBGU-PBS and director of Television Learning Services. "But this is the first time we will be providing a live video stream via the Internet off campus. Families of out-of-state and international students, especially, will find this service helpful." "

With travel down due to various economic, political and health problems this year, it was an ideal time to make a stream of the graduation ceremonies available for those that could not travel to BGSU from other states and countries," adds Dr. Linda Dobb, executive vice president of the University.

Individuals with higher broadband connections--cable modems, DSL, or satellite connections--will be able to view the ceremony in real-time, over their computers from the University's website: www.bgsu.edu.

The video stream will be available on campus at the higher bit rate through the University's Digital Video Streaming Service (DVSS) system.

Streaming is the process of taking analog video and digitizing and compressing it into a video stream that can be sent across the Internet. Many variables are involved, including the quality and size of the video to be streamed, and the end user's Internet connection speed. All of these have to be carefully weighed to ensure the best outcome at the end user level, according to Tom Cummings, technical services coordinator at WBGU-PBS. "

There are two basic types of streaming," Cummings explains. "Live RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) is where the video file is not saved to your computer's hard drive, it just passes through the network interface and displays on your monitor, so the network bandwidth requirement is higher. "

The other basic method is called HTTP streaming, where a video file is downloaded, saved to and played from your computer's hard drive. This is not a realistic option for streaming long programs but is fine for short clips like movie trailers," according to Cummings. "

When we stream off campus, we have to rely on the bandwidth of the end users' particular Internet service provider," Cummings explains. "Due to the inconsistent connections via 56k modems, the end user experience would be very poor, so that is why we are only targeting higher broadband connections. We are recommending users have at least 300 kilobits per second connections in order to view the commencement streams."

Streaming the graduation ceremonies has been in the works since the installation of the DVSS system at BGSU last fall. With the network infrastructure, software and hardware components in place, streaming is now a reality.

The DVSS system was first tested on a campus-wide scale at the onset of the Iraqi War, when WBGU-PBS streamed news reports on campus using the University's broadband network, which allows for higher quality video resolution.

Cummings has been busy setting up and testing the hardware and software that will provide the streams of the various graduation ceremonies off campus. "

We are using Apple software and hardware running on OS X. The server software and live compression software are free," says Cummings. "Quicktime was chosen as the video player software because of its cross platform compatibility. It works very well on Windows and Apple computer systems."

WBGU-PBS will use four servers to feed the video stream to users.

After the commencement ceremonies are over, a downloadable compressed file of each commencement ceremony will be available for end users to access via the University's website.

As broadband connections become more readily available, more and more video streaming will be available on the web, says Cummings. "

I think video streaming is the wave of the future. As more and more bandwidth is made available to homes, the opportunity to watch video at your leisure becomes more and more prevalent," he says. "As software and hardware compression technologies improve the quality of the streams will increase dramatically as well."

(Posted May 07, 2003 )