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title: WWDC2004 Session 727
framework: wwdc
role: article
path: wwdc/wwdc2004-727
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# WWDC2004 Session 727

## Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en okay good morning and welcome to 727 click on in the enterprise this is a there's going to be a really good session because we have two great speakers one from the American Electric Power Company and another gentleman from the University of Wisconsin who are really using Quicktime in in a very large-scale deployment one the guys from American Electric Power are doing a lot of webcasting and have built a lot of custom applications to deploy quicktime streaming services in their corporate environment and the University of Wisconsin has actually converted their cable TV system to Xserve and click on streaming so you guys are going to get a very good idea is that you know how you can deploy quicktime in in a more enterprise like environment so without further ado I'd like to introduce Nate Kaplan from American Electric Power who's going to kick things off for us Thank You Steven hello everyone I'm Nate Kaplan streaming media manager at American Electric Power in Columbus Ohio the focus of my presentation will be on how we've used quick time for corporate communications both internally and externally I'll cover some background about how streaming media evolved at AEP followed by some case studies and opinions see if I can get to the next slide there we go some of the issues around using Quicktime in the enterprise include corporate IT departments common distrust of non Microsoft solutions deploying QuickTime Player to thousands of pcs video asset management how to leverage live webcasting and optimizing production workflow there are also many opportunities for Apple and its developers I think to improve quick time to make it more attractive to enterprise customers like ourselves and I'll address several of those I hope you'll take away from this presentation a lot of useful info including some benefits of using QuickTime versus Windows Media that you can use if you're trying to convince the corporate IT department or university to do so strategies for distributing QuickTime Player as painlessly as possible in the enterprise ideas for building a repository of QuickTime content best practices for for a webcasting studio how live webcasts can be an effective communication medium for employees or students and what opportunities exist for developers to make products that would sell better to enterprise customers here are some of the products that I plan to cover in addition I'll be touching on third-party live webcasting apps like live channel Wirecast and cleaner live i'll also focus a good deal of time on AP TV which is a custom video portal we designed to manage our quicktime content so before i dive into the details on how we use quicktime let me tell you a little bit about who we are american electric powers utility based in columbus ohio we have the largest power generator in the US with 5 million customers and an 11 state service territory we have over 20,000 employees working in almost 500 different work locations which begins to explain why internal communications is a big challenge for us we've had a corporate video Department for almost 20 years and we've been using streaming media for over five years I'd like to show you a quick video now to demonstrate some of the work we do and to tell you a little more about AP it's just a little under two minutes AEP has been through some very dramatic changes in the past few years industry restructuring competition the California energy crisis and the new wholesale energy markets have changed the face of the energy business AEP is not the same company we were only a few years ago we're still one of the largest lowest cost and most reliable electricity providers but we've also become a leading wholesale energy company AEP operates more than 80 power plant with a capacity of 38,000 megawatts making us America's largest power generator this power is generated from coal gas nuclear hydro and wind assuring a balanced mix of fuel sources AEP also operates one of the largest power systems in the world with a world-class transmission and distribution system stretching to 11 states this system serves more than four-and-a-half million customers providing reliable energy at a cost below the national average a few years ago who could have predicted AEP would become one of the top wholesale energy companies in the country right now we're number two and on our way to becoming number one and without a combination of strong regulated and unregulated businesses AEP is clearly poised for long-term growth this isn't I'm going to get out of this right now thank you seen enough that's our CEO we can go back to slides please great the interactive media group that I work in has about 16 people and we're responsible for the company's websites both internal external all of its prints print materials as well as over 200 video projects per year from training and safety videos to ethics legal and environmental compliance to live Town Hall webcasts which brings me to why we use Quicktime first and foremost QuickTime is the glue that ties together our entire production workflow from acquisitions editing to delivery aside from the obvious use of QuickTime in our video production workflow other Apple technologies have influenced our decision to use QuickTime especially the server platform we found Xserve and Xserve raid to be superior and functionality to our PC servers both has departmental file server or as an enterprise streaming media server they cost less especially when you consider the cost of Windows 2003 Enterprise Server licenses they're easier to set up and manage and aren't as susceptible to virus and security intrusions which are all good selling points for our corporate IT folks QuickTime Player is a simple elegant player with advanced features like instant on streaming the Windows Media lacks at least Windows media players that work on our large installed base of Windows NT computers that last point is really important we've used Windows Media also for years and one of its worst problems is the tangle of different versions of Windows media players required for different versions of Windows that we use that fact has held us back from using most of the newer features of Windows Media Player 9 because it requires Windows 2000 it won't work on Windows 98 for example it also requires Windows 2003 server which our corporate IT department has not yet qualified for use in our enterprise so now that you understand who we are and why we decided to use QuickTime I'm going to start by explaining some of what we had to do to deploy QuickTime the first step is obviously distributing the QuickTime Player that may sound simple but there are several challenges unique in a corporate IT environment first we had to obtain a site license which allows us to distribute QuickTime Player to our own users because our IT security department doesn't want users downloading and installing software on their own machines many of them don't even have access to the public Internet next our IT lab installed and tested QuickTime Player on all of our existing Windows platforms which took several weeks in the process they determined the default settings they wanted including turning off features like auto update in the hot pics movie the next step normally would be to update disk images for new PC installs but unfortunately we haven't gotten that far yet at ap doing so is very costly in political process that involves Dell computer as well so instead we filled a custom installer using LANDesk a management tool that our helpdesk people use it allows us to push QuickTime out to a user's PC without having them go through all the prompts that are part of the normal QuickTime installation process and it sets the preferences that we want then as part of our video portal site which I'll talk about a minute we use browser hawk a server-side utility for detecting users configurations to detect whether user has the right version of QuickTime installed and if they don't prompt them to install it finally we've begun to promote QuickTime by making certain content available in enhanced versions in QuickTime only or QuickTime first as we'll talk about later over the next several months we'll be deploying the next version of our a EP TV interface which among other things goes to a single launch button that allows us to determine what format to give people that brings me to AP TV our video portal for employees a subset of our a EP now intranet a EP TV is a combination web-based video library and live webcasting portal where employees can browse continuously updated library of over 200 videos by category or search by keyword that brings us to the demo alright I'll be doing this over the corporate VPN so let's pray to the demo gods that this all works I'm going to start in our corporate intranet AEP now this is basically a central portal the default homepage of all ap employees it's basically a news site updated with company news as well as links to other common tasks like time reporting and expense reporting and HR and all that good good stuff AP TV is integrated into the AP now portal in a few ways there are promotions here to current content that we're doing as well as a link under the tools and resources or useful sites I forget where they put it but also any news story that has a related video has a video icon next to it when you go to that news story there's a sidebar for AP TV that highlights any related videos and it can do one or more so for example if I click this link it's going to pop up the AP TV interface and take you right to the chooser page for that video the chooser page contains a full description of the video title duration as well as the choice of formats and sizes we started out with this site almost two years ago and Windows Media is the kind of top-level default choice but we've added QuickTime to it and plan to switch exclusively to QuickTime over the rest of this year if you click small QuickTime for example it pops up a small playback window and demo gods willing you should play and it looks like they're not let's try the other one well that's too bad not going to play but I'll take you through the rest of the interface if you go to the homepage there's areas for three features first secondary and third feature where we promote current content as well as upcoming webcasts there's pulldown menus at the top for the video library which are broken out by category and so for example we can go into new commercials into the safety ads and see if by any chance another video might play it is my dad so smart changes anything you can fix please sing my bag anything is the best my dad knows how to pay for electricity too you know so you get the idea there there's also an A to Z index which lists all the videos currently visible on the site and there's a search function so for example if I type in oh how about chainsaw chainsaw safety chainsaw safety video alright there's also a feature to sign up where users can give us their email address and we'll notify them about new videos there is a Help section of course feedback allows people to give us their opinion about what they've seen on the site this would be for general feedback but for example if you are on a particular video and you click the feedback button the feedback is specific to that video and it comes to us by email and it gets logged in a database live webcasts are kept in here so you can see a list of upcoming live webcasts if you go to a live webcast page since this webcast is not scheduled to actually start until July 21st of course you can't click on the format's to launch up the videos yet but you can submit in right now and these questions get submitted to a web-based administration form that our folks can monitor while they're actually doing a live webcast real quickly I want to show you the back end of this we have a website called AP TV admin which has as part of it the main section is a clip archive and this is where we can see all of the videos that are actually entered into the site the moment takes a moment to load because there's so many now there we go as you can see there's something like three hundred some-odd videos in here and we have little boxes that explain you know which formats they're available in and the red and green means whether they're actually visible in the menuing interface right now so we can post a video to the site which isn't yet visible to every employee as an example it can be a for approval version then we can send a simple URL link that we'll call it up in the interface it's also a way to post a video that's only supposed to be seen by a small group of employees who will get a link via email all right we can go back to slides please all right so that's AP TV as it is today we've begun working on version 2.0 some of the new features include a single launch button that there instead of the chooser page that you saw before using browser Hawk will determine what connections be the user can sustain and feed them the largest version possible this will allow us to decide if and when to push QuickTime Player which could be a way of posting a pocket which which could be by way of posting a popular video in QuickTime format only because that would force us to default to QuickTime and force people to install it to watch the video other new features include the ability for users to download the video file for their PC if you look at these links on the bottom there's a download video button that would actually download the QuickTime file to their desktop we've had a lot of requests for this lately because people want to present a larger version of the video than their connection speed would prevent them to watch in full in real time and they want to do it maybe when they're not connected to the network in front of a group of people like a presentation like this the other option is to email a video which we're going to be adding it will actually just email a link with their comments to friends or coworkers so that's AP TV what about our QuickTime workflow quite simply at QuickTime and increasingly other Apple products touch every part of it our for producer editors shoot everything on Sony DV cam each one of them has a power book and a dedicated video edit suite with the power mac g5 video capture is always by firewire into either Final Cut Pro or avid Express Pro while all of them can use Final Cut two of them are still more comfortable with the avid interface and so that's what they use recently all of them have begun using soundtrack and live type even the avid guys in addition to After Effects and pro tools and they're all very excited about motion so we're looking forward to that guys once videos are edited a QuickTime TV master file is exported and saved on our X server a we also make and store a DV tape in our library but having the master files always online makes encoding and reuse much easier later on I then encode the video files using cleaner in two versions that are more appropriate for the web the encoded files that I'm copied up to our to QuickTime streaming servers NAEP TV admin is updated to add the clip people watch the video and when they request DVD copies we use DVD Studio Pro to make a master disc and a duplicator to burn and print copies and we fill those requests every Monday all right webcasting studio since we produce over 200 videos a year having a studio is a no-brainer what makes a video studio a webcasting studio is the addition of some gear and some attention paid to audience interaction and visuals that don't break up badly when they're reduced in size and compressed for streaming you don't necessarily need a big space but it needs to be quite well lit and the aw and it needs to be quiet hit AP we have a broadcast grade studio with four cameras an isolated control room audio board video switcher deco tight ler the works we added the streaming media station to the control room for live webcasts it receives the program video and audio feeds and converts it and to converts those to DV over firewire distributing it to multiple video encoders from there I can monitor the encoders as well as remotely monitor the servers up on the 19th floor we also have another booth connected to the control room for an audience interaction manager this person screens calls to our on-air phone system and enters information into that system software that the on-air moderator sees on a laptop that's on the set the audience interaction manager also screens the questions submitted online from a EP TV using a web-based tool that links to the questions database the on-air moderator sees that on his laptop too well we use a Sony broadcast video switcher in our studio a portable switcher like the excellent data video seo hundred is great for doing a live webcast from the field it lets us use up to four DV camcorders connected to it with 165 foot long firewire cables and it outputs a mixed program in DV over firewire directly to our field encoder which is just a laptop running live encoding software for QuickTime live encoding software there are a few choices now from apples free QuickTime six broadcaster to live channel Pro and Wirecast which both costs under $1,000 I'll go more into depth into encoding software in just a little while first I want to talk a little more about doing live webcasts they are not for the faint of heart so we only do them for good reasons which are when audience interaction is desired such as a town hall meeting or an employee forum or when there's really big news to announce that everyone needs to hear at exactly the same time when we do a live webcast we found it's important to promote it as broadly as possible with stories on our internet promos on a AP TV and broadcast emails to pull it off technically multicast is of course very important and that's the one area where finally I can say it's really nice to be working in a corporate Enterprise and in telecom environment we're blessed with an excellent telecommunications network that is over 95% multicast enabled that allows us to run just two streaming servers for the whole enterprise to reach many thousands of live viewers simultaneously if you were planning a large public webcast though it just wouldn't be done without cat without a caching provider like Akamai fortunately our only regular public webcast draw an audience of only several hundred people which our companies t3 connection is able to handle just fine during live webcasts we of course archives to disk the encoded files and afterward we trim them down and post them to AP TV for viewing on demand as quickly as possible we've gotten to the point where we can usually do this within 15 minutes at the end of the live event we also track viewers during live webcast through AP TV admin since we're doing multicast there's no reliable way to track connections in real time at least not without some very expensive Cisco software that our telecom department doesn't want to buy for us so while while I've been talking a lot about the technical aspects I want to drive home the point that since we've been doing this for a while now webcasts have become part of our corporate culture they're now expected whenever there's big news or management wants to discuss something with employees and our new CEO loves to do them because he says it lets them feel connected to the pulse of the employees it also saves him in his top lieutenants considerable time traveling around to give the same speech over and over again and answer the same questions but although QuickTime has served us pretty well so far it could do a lot more to appeal to the needs of enterprise customers for example QT SS publisher is a very neat 1.0 product when I first saw it I was excited at the prospect of easily managing our growing library but it really needs a better user interface that doesn't break down when throwing dozens or hundreds of files at it at once it also needs to be more flexible in where it allows media to be stored on the system and it could benefit from reporting capabilities for example wouldn't it be nice if it could access QT SS logs to show chart show and chart viewer statistics also we run to QuickTime streaming servers in tandem for load balancing and we can't find any way to easily duplicate a QT SS publisher library from one server to another quicktime streaming server is much better in Panther server and I thought Apple for building a better management tool we could really use a true multi bitrate solution though that detects users bandwidth and switches streams on-the-fly our browser Hawk solution is an imperfect workaround it took considerable effort to develop we would also like to see built-in support for clustering and failover with two server sharing load but was either able to take over for the other in case of failure even during a live webcast we love quicktime player but it was a long tough process to get all of our ducks in a row to distribute it of all the things the NAG movie caused a lot of arguments with our IT folks who were afraid that users would be confused and go out and purchase quicktime pro or at least flood the help desk with questions about what that pop-up box means also while we were able to convince our IT department to develop a custom installer it almost didn't happen Apple should have a free customizable Enterprise QuickTime installer just like real and Windows Media do compressor is a great new product but we still aren't using it for anything but DVDs because it can't do sorenson to pass variable bitrate encoding perhaps this point will come move when h.264 ships finally QuickTime broadcaster could really use an update to add support for multiple streams higher quality encoding at larger sizes that universities and enterprises can support on their high-speed networks a real preview and integration with keynote for broadcasting slide presentations and separate web browser window or frame next to a live webcast it would seem only natural that Apple could do this lately at least Apple has gotten most of the really important stuff right for the enterprise X serve and xserve raid are just beautiful products we love them they make our IT guys jealous which I love all I can say is keep up the good work Panther server was a welcome improvement and it's been rock-solid for us I'm anxious to learn more about what Tiger server brings to the table X Sam Wow I've been waiting for this for years we have we've had a fiber Channel SAN among our video edit Suites before based on a doe Excel wear but it never really worked reliably and we finally had to just throw it out I suspect X Sam will sell very well I for one plan to put in an order for one next year X grid seems like a great opportunity for distributed batch video encoding I hope Apple Sorenson and discrete consider updating compressor squeeze and cleaner to exploit that with about 30 modern Macs in our workgroup including three x herbs and about half a dozen Power Mac g5 s maybe my batches can finally complete in less than a day on the topic of h.264 this is really going to improve the quality of the experience we can give to our users but it won't matter unless it plays back on a free Windows version of the QuickTime Player I hope Apple does not make the mistake Microsoft did by trying to make new features in Windows Media tied to the operating system in an effort to sell that OS if it does we might have to abandon QuickTime someday because all of our viewers are on Windows finally I'm really excited about the squeeze 4 from Sorenson which is officially in beta as of this week it's the first all-new third-party QuickTime encoding solution for Mac in several years and it's exactly what discrete could have done with cleaner if they'd only listened to users about the interface live encoding is still one Achilles heel for QuickTime right now we really need a pro webcasting application there are only a few players out there with any QuickTime live there are only a few a few players out there in the QuickTime live webcasting market I've already talked about quicktime broadcaster then there's live channel which which tries too hard to be a studio in the box with a busy interface chock-full of stuff I don't need because we already have a studio and the main problem though is it doesn't do multiple streams Wirecast is a new product from vero software that looks really promising it does do multiple live streams which is great but like QT broadcaster its UI is very basic and it lacks PowerPoint or keynote integration and although it does do multiple streams they're completely independent so if you use any of its video switching features you can't synchronize those actions among the different streams cast stream isn't really an encoder at all just a presentation system for live webcasts regardless though it's not practical for us since it requires a proprietary player and server and has expensive licensing fees for as many simultaneous users as we need other products and services from Viraj and yahoo broadcast that try to appeal to enterprise clients like us are too ambitious and aggressive in scope and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars plus they require extensive customization once you buy them they assume we want to just write a big check and have someone else handle the whole production that brings us to what we've been using these last couple years discrete cleaner live in most respects it's the perfect live webcasting app but it has a couple of major problems that limit its future usability for us it only does Windows Media and real and discrete has discontinued it regardless though it still serves as well I'd like to show you a few screenshots in hopes that if any of you watching or developers working on a QuickTime webcasting app you take note of why it's so appealing just look at this UI at a glance you can see that the status and flow of video and audio data into encoded output it's almost it's almost pretty enough to have been designed by Apple there are audio level controls and vu meters and it's video level adjustments and and there are video level adjustments that can be made in real time during a live webcast which are right there it shows an accurate preview in a floating window of any of the encoded outputs or the original signal before and after pre-processing and you can switch that view during a live webcast broadcasting and recording can be turned on and off independently and it can even record to disk the DV stream that comes in over firewire in addition to the encoded outputs it can simultaneously encode multiple separate windows media streams that anything from 240 by 180 dial up to one megabit per second 480 by 360 full framerate versions for streaming over land it does this entirely in software with video input over firewire even on a laptop it also has PowerPoint integration it can load a PowerPoint presentation then generate PNG files of each slide FTP those up to a web server and build a web template for presenting the video and slide side-by-side then during the live webcast it monitors what slide a user is viewing in a PowerPoint session on a remote PC and send script track commands in the live stream to flip the slides on viewers screens ironically it even works for viewers on Macs using Windows Media Player for Mac even its settings window is a work of simplicity for managing multiple live outputs it would seem to me that if discrete with its limited resources dedicated to this project could put this product together almost two years ago Apple or one of its third-party developers should be able to leverage QuickTime and a g5 to do even better on the Mac for us at least this is really the last piece of the puzzle as I understand we're supposed to wait until the end for questions and answers so I'll turn it over now to the next presenter here we go stay well thanks for coming out everyone my name is Dave Schrader I'm a Mac geek at the University of Wisconsin that's a really fun job and what I'm going to talk about today is see here I'm going to talk about an IP video delivery solution that we have recently put together at the University we're currently in a pilot phase what we wanted to do was replace an existing actual cable-tv physical plant infrastructure that we operated for many years with something that would deliver this over the network when we started off on this path we looked at a bunch of solutions from many different vendors and we ended up settling on a solution based on quicktime technologies and apple hardware products so I'm going to talk a little bit about the decisions that went into that went into us actually getting to this point and how we actually put the system together and right now like I say we're just in pilot we we would like to expand what we talked about here today and the exact hardware software and techniques that we use to put this thing together so what we call our system that we've built is the digital academic television network or Dayton for short we are deploying this alongside a new network that we're deploying on the campus over the next few years and since these things go hand in hand it's interesting to look at a little bit of the history of where we have come over the past couple of decades what brought us to this point so the roots of Dayton are in our old TV network that we operated called the academic television network or etienne and where this came from was actually from an earlier predecessor that was that was a computer network so in 1980 when I guess I was like 6 or 7 years old our organization's predecessor the Madison academic computing Center was operating a UNIVAC and people were starting to want remote terminal access to this computer and when the university started looking at ways to get remote terminal access to people we realized that the that using copper cables would actually fill up all the conduits space available in the building many many times over and we and we knew we had to look at other solutions so we put together a broadband data transmission system that is similar to what is used for cable television today called site saitec localnet and because it was so similar to you know physically to what was required to do video distribution didn't take long for departments on campus to start asking to be able to deliver video over this system and we and we did just that and a couple years later we switched to Ethernet over this broadband network using cable modems which are ancestors to the modern cable modems that people use today in their homes and we jump ahead about a decade on the video side of things we knew that we needed to deploy cable TV into our dormitories to be able to have that one be one of the things that attracts students to live in the university operated housing so we actually embarked on a project where we wired all of our dorms with normal axial cable and called it the residential television network the original network that we operated was the academic television network and and this was available to all the dorms and we contracted with the local cable operator to provide all these channels all of the local cable channels non premium channels to the dorms now I should mention about the academic television network it is something that was used for instructional content departments were allowed to put whatever they wanted on it so we gave channels to people like the College of Engineering our School of Nursing and they maybe have there was some experimentation with doing courses over over this network so people could go to remote locations and actually attend a lecture or watch preexisting instructional content that some departments would put together and then loop on particular channels or play at predefined times so really a lot of people had their own channels so they can do whatever they wanted to do with when we built when we when we did the RTN we asked our local cable operator which in our areas Charter Communications formerly Bresnan formerly TCI and now we're at charter to allow us to put some selected channels on the academic television network so we took channels like CNN Headline News c-span The Weather Channel and some foreign language channels and things of that nature and and put them on the academic television network and that this is important because this represents the basis of what we're able to do with Dayton today that you'll hear about in a minute so a couple of years ago we started having trouble maintaining the ATN it was tough to find replacements for some of the equipment a lot of equipment was becoming obsolete or had been obsolete for years it was hard to find people with with actual cable TV and video expertise to maintain the system and it was hard to find people like that who wanted to crawl around in steam tunnels to repair the equipment as it broke so the next item there is that the ATN was shut down that's not strictly true it was kind of shut down in phases as things failed and until it just stopped working completely and we knew we we knew we wanted to replace the functionality of a TN with something else so in 2002 and it took us a couple of years to do this we approached the cable operator and and said what if we were able to deliver the same content that you licensed to us on our own cable network what if we were able to deliver that over the network and they did agree to this and so this year our contract was amended to allow us to deliver just to the Madison campus the same channels that we used to deliver on the ATN but deliver it over the network so here's a little brief synopsis of where we've come with with the network over the past couple of decades and this new network that we're building we call the 21st century network you can see back in 83 we started with 10 megabit Ethernet operated over that broadband coax network and then we switched to Ethernet over fiber and then went a hundred megabit over fiber a type of system called fiber distributed data interface or fitty and then we went to ATM and now the new network we're building is a 10 gigabit ethernet backbone that we think is going to carry us into the future and it's it the network is funded in part John morgridge the chairman of Cisco is a former UW student and he gave us a nice gift to help on this network so the reason why we started down this path to build a new network was because we realized that we had exponential traffic growth but not exponential funding growth if we let the traffic grow and in the university wisconsin has always had a philosophy of we're not going to limit traffic we're not going to limit what people do with the network and so as things grew we had to find ways to pay for it and that was becoming increasingly difficult and also another aspect is that the University of Wisconsin is a large campus this is the Madison campus we have almost 50,000 students we have tens of thousands of employees thirty major departments and units and a lot of little departments and a whole bunch of different lands that all have their own needs and desires and ways that they want to run their network that sometimes don't cooperate with how we want to centrally administer the network so the solutions that we came to are really eliminating a lot of a lot of the multiple transports that we used to maintain like appletalk IPX and everything converging everything typey standardizing on all of our equipment minimizing the need for manual e administering things and doing things by hand and trying to get all the management monitoring administration into a central easy-to-use location and automate as much of the management of the network as possible which again meant that we had to reach standardization and also the top item there which I skipped over is while we do want to centrally administer the network and kind of have have a central point of control we do want to allow individual departmental network administrators to be able to do things with the network when they can so we have what we call authorized agents who we kind of bless and say okay you can go into your network in closets and make changes and this is important because as we travel into doing things like IP telephony one of the other things we noticed is that some of our networking closets especially in some of the buildings on campus that are over a hundred years old sometimes consisted of a 10 megabit Ethernet hub resting up against a garbage can in a custodial closet and that isn't the you know in an unlocked custodial closet and that's not the kind of security or reliability that we think need to be able to do some of the modern things we want to do with a network especially as the network becomes more and more dependent upon everyday like a utility like you know we expect the water and power and everything else to be there and we expect the network to be there as well so there's massive upgrades not only to the equipment but to the physical environment and facilities that was required to so the so we changed the funding model old model was based on bandwidth new model is based on headcount number of FTEs full-time people we have in our departments now and we also have factored in the cost of expanding the network in the future maintaining it and that sort of thing so some departments weren't happy with this change of the revenue model because they were paying a very small amounts of money to support you know sometimes several dozen employees who are just doing things like you know your conventional web access checking email and that sort of stuff so when we cut departments over to the 21st century network and all of a sudden start charging them an order of magnitude more money in some cases they want to know what they're what they're getting for this and you know we can we try to explain things like like like security and like futures people may want to do remote attendance of conferences and things of that nature and and you know remote tell it immersion and that sort of thing and these things just aren't possible with the type of network we're operating before so this new network gives 100 megabit connectivity managed connectivity to every desktop to every office every jacket the university that gets moved over to the 21st century network which will eventually be all of them are all 100 megabit switched network and we've we can implement things down the road like quality of service authentication to the network things of that nature so we wanted to be able to show the campus killer applications for why they would want to move over to this network and we think that Dayton video delivery over the network is one of them so when we decided to at building Dayton we looked at of several different solutions we looked at windows media we looked at real we looked at Cisco IPTV which was actually very important because we had a lot of funding from Cisco so that was naturally one of the first things that we looked at and we we looked at some proprietary solutions like video furnace and some appliance devices to do video encoding and delivery and it didn't take us long to figure out that some of the solutions wouldn't work because we wanted we wanted Dayton to be based on open standards and when we looked at a bunch of different codecs that were out there the codec family that we finally decided on was the MPEG family and specifically mpeg-4 and so what we're using today is mpeg-4 and we're obviously very happy to hear about the mpeg-4 part 10 or h.264 mpeg-4 and QuickTime right now and we do plan to transition to that another thing that we wanted so that was that was a key open standards and that kind of plays into the next thing flexible content delivery we want to be able to reach the widest variety of clients possible we don't want to be tied in to clients or platforms that have just you know whatever the particular player that's that's required available we want to be able to play to other things not just computers to possibly you know set-top boxes and other devices on the client end and cost was a concern for us we initially have a relatively small pilot but we wanted to obviously keep the cost down and the Xserve that we use to do the broadcasting is a lot less expensive than some competitive products and one of the thing that we can do easily albeit with a little modification is multiple streams with a single server multiple different streams with a single server that is as easy as it is or sometimes even possible on other platforms as it is on 10 and then the software well this was a no-brainer a QuickTime Player free for Mac OS and Windows QuickTime broadcaster free cook time streaming server essentially free because we do all of our streaming with Xserve comes with OS 10 server which comes with QuickTime streaming server and then a few more things about QuickTime the capabilities could kind of set it apart from some of the other solutions QuickTime text rack allowing us to embed custom text in our movies such as closed captioning some of you may be familiar with this as teletext so instead of when we wanted to when we decided to make this service accessible and wanted to go down the road of closed captioning and talk to some of the other vendors about the solutions that they were offering we said well how would we do closed captioning and their solution was essentially to double up on the streams and double up on the amount of hardware and do one version with closed captioning and one without and or just force everyone to take the closed captioning content well neither of those solutions were really appealing to us so QuickTime text track allows us to separate out the closed captioning content put it in its own little box and we have one channel that I've that I've kind of hacked together because we do all this on we restrict all this to our local network so I put together one channel that we can get to from here and hopefully they'll be closed captioning available so you can see it QuickTime skins allows us to put together a nice interface to our front-end to this that's that's constrained just to the player so people don't even need to visit a webpage after they download this one file or they can just visit a webpage and click on a link and a custom interface will load that will allow them to do things like change channels turn on and off closed captioning and other things like that and because of the granularity of the system because all these pieces that we do for things like closed captioning and text track and everything are all separate we don't have to force certain pieces of the technology on people who may or may not want to use it and people on other platforms arms that might not have Quicktime present like linux solaris and what have you can use client oak some open-source clients like VLC to also view the broadcasts so we really wanted to reach the widest range of people possible so here's kind of generally what we've done with our pilot we have an X we have an X serve that's a head node that acts as the services front-end to the web and has some administrative tools on it for monitoring the rest of the nodes we have multiple cluster nodes that are actually the machines that do the streaming and then along with each of those cluster nodes we have some additional equipment to get a video from rackmount tuner into the excerpt via firewire to do things like capture the closed captioning and also PCI tuner cards is another option that we'll talk about so here's exactly what the hardware is right now we're on dual processor X or of g4s for the head node and the cluster nodes and for the support equipment we use the Canopus adb c100 a V digital AV converters some blonder-tongue rackmount kind of industrial rackmount TV tuners and also the Miglia pci TV tuner cards which weren't available when we originally embarked on this project their card was key because it's one of the very few out there and I think actually the only one right now that is a 3.3 volt pci card that works in not only the power mac g5 but in the Xserve and the Xserve g5 and we also use a product from a company called text grabber to capture the closed captioning and then the software side of things of course OS 10 server broadcast or QuickTime streaming server and on the client end course QuickTime Player available on Mac OS and Windows but then open source players like VLC which people can use on Mac OS and windows but also other platforms Linux BLS Solaris pretty much anything you can think of or any mpeg-4 compliant device like mpeg-4 like set-top boxes that might have the capability to playback mpeg-4 content so someone might be able to have this paired up with a television set or a projector and doesn't necessarily have to have strictly a computer to view these broadcasts so here's a typical node for Dayton the head node is just kind of by itself and you can see it's a picture of an excerpt of g5 there it will be a g5 soon it's currently a g4 and then our streaming nodes we've got the cluster node itself and the tuner is connected to video and audio to our little kV firewire converter and the match just connected by a single firewire cable to the to the Xserve and then we have this closed captioning decoder that is connected by another composite video cable to the Canopus and then via a serial cable to the Xserve so we actually use the serial port on the Xserve instead of for management we actually just use it as a normal serial port we've disabled the console capability and one of the configuration files on OS 10 server and just let it act as a straight serial port and then in some of the servers we've started experimenting or also with the alchemy TV card for Miglia so asset without the ultimate TV card we can do one channel with closed captioning in to you of Rackspace if we don't talk about closed captioning we've actually found that we can do three simultaneous broadcasts from one server in 1u of Rackspace using these tuner cards now in the excerpt of G five there's only two PCI slots so we're back down to two unless we want to do something with firewire but and we think that two is probably a good number anyway so we figured we're figuring on being able to do two channels in 1u of Rackspace and we're already doing that now so what does Deighton actually look like and so here's our here's our pilot system right now you can see that we've got a bunch of X or cluster nodes and interspersed in between exort exort cluster node is our tuner and the reason why we've done that is the tuners are really not that deep they're only a couple inches deep and the exurbs are however deep they are and so they kind of leave this little shelf of space in between each exercise of OS 10 server and doing things like cloning drives that are just you know really straightforward on OS 10 all we really did was set up the system on one cluster node of how we how we wanted everything to be configured and then we just kind of blasted that out to the rest of machines and we actually even had all the server's running for awhile just net booted from the head node I didn't really see any advantage of keeping doing just the net booting since it was so eat since it was like just minutes to clone a drive and pop it into it into a new machine so then we could eliminate one other kind of point of failure and and this is it this is what our web front-end looks like we wanted people running whatever OS they were running to be able to hit this site so this is actually our channels page and we just have all of our channel logos of what we're carrying right now and now might be a good time to stop here and talk for a second but I've had a couple people ask me why is it in TV channels who cares if someone can watch CBS on their desktop especially if you're already delivering cable TV to your dorms and to university buildings using just ordinary cable and cable network well this this isn't just we don't envision this just being for doing cable TV channels we did cable TV channels first because they were the easiest we already had an agreement with our cable operator it was easy to get the content it's just content and it's something that people can identify with people know TV and when they see it come up in a little window on their computer and when we explain to them that you know these types of things that you're doing now that seem relatively simple just weren't possible on our network before we're a very large campus and we we don't think that we it would have been practical or possible to deploy something like this to this number of people without some of the new technologies that the new network gives us not only the higher bandwidths that we get but doing everything with multicast so as the previous presenter was referring to this multicast capability is really key for those of you in here who might not be familiar with what this multicast means what it essentially means is when everyone let's say someone decides they want to view CNN and they click on the CNN logo and it comes up on their screen on a unicast Network which is really just what most networks and ordinarily are every single person who clicks on CNN that's another stream going out from the server it's more load on the server and it's more load on the pipe leading to the server every single additional connection takes more bandwidth and has more load on the server with multicast there's one stream coming out of the server and that signal has the capacity to get anywhere on the network that multicast is enabled other computers out on the network out on network segments that aren't viewing any broadcast don't have to see the traffic but if you get one to ten people viewing it in a particular building it's all still just the one signal that's going out so that's really critical because it means that we can have limited Hardware on our end for delivery and limited impact on the network when people use a service like this so we want to add in instructional content we want to put encoders at some of the some of the broadcast studios that are that we have on campus for example Wisconsin Public Television exists on our campus our School of Journalism and mass communication would like to put content on Deighton so really anyone who wants to become a part of Dayton after we're out of the pilot phase can get an encoder and can get some kind of placement or representation within Dayton and can then start referring their customer base to one central location for video content here's our player a guy by the name of George cook from Apple helped us set this player up so this is a QuickTime skin that just has all the channels that we carry right now over on the left hand side you can click on them and change the channel we have a special area up here that could potentially display customized information whether information announcements what-have-you then of course the video itself ways to turn on and off closed captioning and our actual closed captioning content the way that the closed captioning works is we have a script that runs on each individual streaming machine that captures each line of closed captioning text as it comes in from that text grabber box and it places it in an XML file on the server the web server is turned on Apaches turned on on each cluster node and this text track here knows to query a particular URL and check and see if there's a new line of text if there is display it if there's not do nothing or if there's no text to just have it black and and and people can people have the option to turn that off people have the option to go fullscreen and eliminate all this other stuff around it people have the option to even view the closed captioning content completely by itself and this is probably a good good time to just briefly touch on what I mean by the granularity is useful to us if this was some kind of a turnkey solution we wouldn't be able to do something that the School of Journalism came to us and asked which is hey you're capturing you have all this closed caption content associated with these channels what if we took all of the closed captioning put it in a database made it searchable and collected it for weeks or months or years and took little thumbnail snapshots of whatever the video was along with the closed captioning text so every 30 seconds or a minute just for reference and made this a searchable database for our faculty and our students so that people could do things like maybe search all of the news channels for particular terms that occurred how many times did this occur in a particular period and we can become a very valuable research tool and a very valuable historical tool and I don't think that a turnkey solution that might have provided us with with this would not have enabled us to do the same types of things that we can do with everything so granular on Mac os10 so we're going to try to do a demo and if we could switch to the demo machine thank you and so here's what customers see when they come in to the dating site right now we give people a URL and just tell them you know we don't really tell them what they need or anything like that first if someone's asking about dating we just say okay visit Dayton dot with DD you and you guys can visit this site too because we have some other information up here that talks about Dayton or history things we use and kind of just some of the things that I've talked about here and some pictures of the project so the first page we just give people some basic information review your system requirements verify that you're connected to a multicast network and since we're tying this with the 21st century network which is what which is the thing that's actually enabling multicast for most people we've gotten a lot of requests lately for when are we going to get cut over the 21st century network make sure that the people have Quicktime and then we send people either to the channels page or to the player pledge and if they click this image it's just going to load this skin and start playing and unfortunately I can't do that here because it requires multicast but let's go to the channels page and remember I was talking about we wanted to make this as accessible to everyone as possible well if people click on these things it's just going to open up in QuickTime Player and I do have one that I can show you in a minute but for each channel there's a little eye next to it and if you click on the eye we actually give out all of the kind of underlying information about the properties of this channel so the URLs of the movie file itself the FTP file the files associated with closed captioning the multicast IP addresses that we're using and these are locally what are called locally scoped multicast addresses so by default that keeps it within just uw-madison zone network which we need to do to stay within our contract terms with charter what kind of encoding parameters we're using for each Channel and and then actual content to the SDP file itself and some links to other things so if people want to come in here with a client like VLC you know we've named everything sensibly in terms of DNS so each channel is just channel name Dayton dealt with State edu and we've made the SDP file the actual web index file on the server so if someone opens up VLC and goes to open network and just types in CNN Dayton that with edu and the open network field and and that's it and nothing else it'll just pop up in a player and they can go fullscreen and they can do whatever they want so we wanted to make it really easy for other devices that or and and players that might just need an SDP file to connect to to connect to these things and we've got a couple of links here to things like you know TV schedules and that sort of thing so and then we've got a help page that kind of just Ria's a rehash of the front page right now and then a little bit additional information about what if you want to use VLC to connect to this service so let's see if c-span works what I've done here is we have a unicast version of this one broadcast and wait till the keyframe comes in so there we go and and obviously there would be up there's audio along with it as well but this is what people see now that now when you look at what we what our qualifications were for this for this services we wanted it to be able to handle high-speed motion so we do 30 frames per second it actually works for sporting events and things like that and we wanted it to be able to do we wanted text to be visible but we wanted to do it at still a reasonable enough quality we're relatively low end clients would be able to connect to this thing we didn't want to blast everyone out of the water and require some high-end p4s or g4s to be able to connect to this what's that oh yes so the video stream right now is about 1.3 megabits and you'll see it just spike every once in a while but we've got it set at 1.3 and then the audio is separate from that we could we can actually get higher qualities if we go higher bandwidth and we think we're going to be able to get really higher quality with h.264 so we're really looking forward to using the h.264 codec we can even get higher quality if we use the third-party MPEG 4 codec from an in from a place called terrific at 3 IV XCOM right now we're just using the Apple mpeg-4 codec so if we go fullscreen you'll be able to see that it is a little bit grainy but like I said the priority was to be able to to reach the widest possible variety of clients with the technology for encoding that we had available to us right now now hopefully there's closed captioning along with this and you'll be able to see see that - well this is one of the this is one of the times where the for unfortunately the demo guards aren't with me it doesn't look like there's closed captioning along with it right now if there was you'd see the text scrolling along on the bottom of the screen in fact what I can do is just see if I can bring up the closed captioning from another channel so here's how it works and now your not going to be able to unfort the video is not going to load for this because this is just a multicast only channel but there it is that's how the closed captioning works and on the info page for each channel we let people even load the closed captioning by itself if they want to so people can pretty much take this and do whatever they want to do with it they can even access the XML file that has the raw text in it themselves so that is Dayton and could go back to the slides I don't think there's actually any slides left for more information you can visit our web site at Dayton twisted edu and here's here's how to get in touch with Nate and Dave Deborah Weber is actually a manager of this project at the University couldn't make it with us today but that's my presentation thank you [Applause]