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ARTICLE 8: DC's VOD
by
Darryl Anderson,
Executive Director Office of Cable Television and Telecommunications,
Washington, D.C.
and Dan Westman
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Almost two years ago, Washington DC’s Office of Cable Television and
Telecommunications (OCTT) set out to provide its programming on-demand via its
Internet website in addition to its real-time twenty-four hour streaming of its
two channels of programming. Internet- based video-on-demand (VOD) is a growing
means by which many moderate to high-tech DC area residents are turning to in
order to access specialized programming. Because of the relatively low cable
television subscriber penetration in the District, OCTT set out to provide an
alternative means for viewers to access to the content of its programming;
Council of the District of Columbia and its various committee meetings and
programming that highlights the activities of the Mayor of the District of
Columbia, District government agencies, their programs and services.
Contrarily, the District of Columbia has one of the largest penetration rates
for residential and commercial Internet access among large cities across the
country. Today OCTT provides an on demand video service to district residents
as well as the entire world. Visitors can browse and view every city council
meeting televised over the past year and the current original programming
lineup. This creative new means by which the District has chosen to distribute
information to its residents has really caught on in terms of ease of use,
reliability and flexibility for its users. This is how we did it.
Getting
From A to Internet
To accomplish this
goal, OCTT needed to address several issues. OCTT had to determine how to
coordinate actually launching the program. There were several technical
obstacles to overcome. These ranged from the basic digitization of analog
video, to determining the most appropriate application format. Further, we had
to identify a user-friendly interface for more than 34,000 clients on the
District’s own employee network as well as public users. Four primary questions
had to be answered: 1) The format for encoding the video files; 2) The most
efficient way to encode the files; 3) Managing the volume of archived; and 4)
Identifying the most appropriate server to manage the file system.
Determining File Format
In
order for OCTT to get the two cable channels’ video to display on a user’s
computer, there were several choices in formats. Apple’s Quicktime, Real
Networks’ RealPlayer and Microsoft’s Windows Media Player are the top three
players in use today. OCTT initially experimented with the RealPlayer, however,
finding the free player was a challenge for novice client users, installation
was unnecessarily diluted with software add-ons and tricky click boxes to avoid
receiving unsolicited advertising and spam. Further, the installation and
subsequent upgrades usually require rebooting machines and providing identifying
client information that was intrusive to our network users. It was important
for OCTT to ultimately choose a player that was widely embraced in the
community, free (or at a very low-cost) and offered the most options for
encoding. In the end, OCTT chose Windows Media as the format for several
reasons.
First, the player was free and available to a wide variety of operating systems
from Solaris to Mac to Microsoft and most people who are running a Microsoft
Windows operating system already have the player installed by default. Also,
the player is easy to find, download and install from Microsoft’s website.
Finally, most network administrators whose infrastructure is generally built on
Microsoft technologies find the player easy to support, troubleshoot and upgrade
at the client level or as “push” installations over the network. As currently
configured, OCTT’s server license allows for up to 2000 simultaneous users.
About 50 users have attempted to simultaneously download a single file. We have
had nearly 600 users downloading a variety of files available from the site at
one time. There were no errors or failures when either of these
activities occurred.
Encoding Media Files
Fortunately, OCTT had the infrastructure in place
to encode to Windows media through an existing video editing suite. The desktop
editor was being phased out by the production team and with the on-demand
initiative, we found ourselves with the perfect encoding device. Specifically,
it is a DPS Reality/Velocity system, which supports the output of video as
RealMedia or Microsoft streams. It is important to note that encoding (for most
Internet applications) can be achieved through the acquisition of a quality
audio/video capture card (in our case – the card that was packaged with the
encoding system) , a high end desktop PC (with lots of hard drive space –
we have 30Gigs for temporary storage) and the use of the free Window Media
encoding software. This may sound scary, but encoding is a simple matter of
routing a video and audio signal to the encoder and recording that signal to a
Windows Media file on a hard drive. These files can be encoded directly to the
server via a network connection, or to a dedicated desktop for the purpose of
encoding. Don’t let your consultants sell you extremely high-end hardware you
don’t need, especially if you’re just starting out.
Managing the Numerous
Video Files
OCTT
offers around 115Gigs of online programming at any given time. That space
accommodates over a year of city council programs and 3 months of regularly
produced original programming. OCTT produces a large volume of
programming each year via its two channels. Since city council meeting are
usually quite long, OCTT decided to split the files into 30-minute segments to
ease the viewer’s burden of searching for a particular segment within a
meeting. Obviously, with a year’s worth of city council meetings, this quickly
becomes a large number of files stored on the hard drive. Keeping track of and
archiving these files can be a daunting task.
It
is critically important that you determine a consistent process for cataloguing
these files so that they may be easily accessed, organized and recalled. This
can be accomplished relatively easily through the use of a consistent file
nomenclature and a simple database application to manage the content of each
file. OCTT is currently using an automated custom software solution to split
these large city council files into the 30-minute segments and then upload the
files and their content descriptions to our locally housed on-demand server.
OCTT
chose to set-up this service in-house. Depending on your needs, consider
exploring options for transmitting the archived files to a remote server to
alleviate your network infrastructure of bandwidth use that can be diverted at
what is continuing to become a low-cost expense. Many Internet media firms
provide this service – many specifically for cable access channel applications.
Determining an Appropriate
Server Type
Since OCTT chose
Windows Media, the choice of a server platform was an easy decision. Windows
2000 Server ships with an optional Windows Media Server software, so server
setup was a simple matter of configuring Windows 2000 to transmit Windows Media
video. Consult your I.T. department’s network administrators for guidance on
server support. This may also guide your encoding format as well.
Get Into the Business
Three years ago, launching a video-on-demand streaming program with your
government cable access channels seemed like an overly technical, expensive and
high-maintenance endeavor. Today, with an Internet connection capable of
handling the bandwidth needed to efficiently upload the files to a remote
server, licensure for multiple downloads of the files you intend to make
available, encoder card, PC and server, you can be in business for
a start-up cost of less than $25,000 and an annual expense of less than $4,000
(plus labor for encoding and managing the files).
This
seemed like a reasonable investment that allows OCTT to provide the DC
government’s cable programming, on-demand, to DC residents and the world via the
Internet – all at their convenience. Many District employees who live in
Maryland and Virginia can now watch the programs that are related to their
departments from their suburban homes. We have received comments about out
programming from around the world. Visit us at octt.dc.gov and see how simple
this project is to initiate and to use.
LINKS:
Video on demand from Washington
D.C.’s Office of Cable Television and Telecommunications
The City of Las
Vegas, NV also provides Video on Demand.
Pinellas County, FL has its Board meetings available as Video on Demand using
Real Player.
Here’s are
links to channels that stream over the web.
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