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]