TechTalks Transcript
Streaming Video Applications: Planning and Delivery
 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 Bob Taylor [BT] |
January 25, 2001
Audio
• Streaming
MP3
• Download
MP3 (Download
Tips)
JB: Welcome to the CREN Tech Talk series for spring of 2001 and to this session on Streaming Video Applications: Planning and Delivery. You are here because it's time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus. This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today and our session is coming to you today with the support of our CREN member institutions.
I'd like to welcome our technology anchor for Tech Talk, Howard Strauss of Princeton, and as you know, Howard is a well-known web technology expert and portal expert. And Howard, are you ready for streaming video?
HS: Am I ready?
JB: Are you ready?
HS: I think our users are ready and that creates a real challenge. Okay, thank you, Judith. I'm Howard Strauss, the technology anchor for the Tech Talk series of technology webcasts. In this webcast, I invite you to join Judith and me in a lively technical dialogue with our guest expert, Bob Taylor, that will answer the questions you'd like answered and ask those very important follow-up questions. You can join us in this dialogue by sending your questions via e-mail to expert@cren.net anytime during this webcast. If we don't get to your questions during the webcast, we'll provide an answer in the webcast archive.
Once upon a time in a land far, far away, people only used monochrome screens on their computers. Many people argued that color screens were an unnecessary and expensive frill that could not be justified. After all, computers were just used for display and manipulation of data and we all knew that data was always black and white. Of course, that land I'm talking about is where we all lived, not too many years ago.
Today, it is hard to find a computer screen that can't display millions of colors, except perhaps on PDA's where the argument is being made that color is an unnecessary and expensive frill that cannot be justified. By now, everyone should know that to display complex information, we need all the help we can get. Charts, graphs, sounds, animations and full-motion video all add immeasurably to improving the display and manipulation of complex data. The fact is that the world most of us perceive is not a silent, still, monochrome place. It is full of sound, color, and ever-changing motion. If we expect to conduct online classes, conferences, concerts or convincing simulations, we must include convincing audio and video. We also can no longer afford to have an important event on campus that is not at least recorded and archived, if not also broadcast live. Whether important events include lectures and presentations by the administration remains to be determined.
Not too long ago, video applications required the highest level of technical skills, along with equipment that few could afford. Today, students with rudimentary computer skills can produce and distribute full-motion video to the world from their own dorm rooms, using only garden variety PC's, a typical dormitory network connection and free software from the web. It may not be wonderful video, but that it can be done at all is an omen that no one involved with information technology can afford to ignore.
We now have this wonderful new tool, but what will we do with it? Doing nothing is not an option. Our users have it too, and if we do not exercise leadership in this area, there will be video chaos. As Gandhi said, "There go my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader." To do that, we'll need to understand the best uses of video technology and what kind of planning and resources will be required to deliver the new services this technology will make possible. Bob Taylor will try to keep us a step ahead of the hordes of users that we'll be leading to streaming video nirvana on today's webcast of Tech Talk. Judith?
JB: Thanks very much, Howard, and I'd like you to know that I've got a new PDA with color that I just haven't taken out of the package yet, but I'm just really anxious to do.
BT: And I've been shopping for one recently.
JB: Oh, there you go!
HS: Well, I think we're on the leading edge, then.
JB: I hope so. I'm just real pleased that we're here to think about how we're going to use this streaming video for our instruction and research purposes. We have had it around for a long time and it's always been so expensive and now we know that it's not really easy now, but it's certainly easier. And to share with us just how we go about that, I'm really pleased to welcome back Bob Taylor from Northwestern University for a follow-up session on streaming video applications and focused talking a bit about what's changed actually in the last 12 months.
Bob is the Director of Academic Technologies at Northwestern and his role there is to support Northwestern faculty in the use and adaptation of technology for instruction and research. In that role, Bob and the group, the Academic Technologies group there, provide training and one-on-one consulting to faculty members and also manage the university's electronic classrooms and computer lab classroom facilities. Bob was a guest expert on Tech Talk about a year ago when we discussed networked digital video. Welcome back, Bob.
BT: Judith and Howard, it's a pleasure to join you again. Howard, I have to make note that this is the first time I've heard of a digital video talk being introduced in the context of Gandhi and maybe a spirit of nonviolent resistance!
HS: I hope that's what we see!
BT: I hope that, too, buddy!
JB: Well, I hope we don't have a sit-down or anything associated with this.
HS: Okay, Bob, why don't we start by just sort of giving us a quick overview of what this technology really is? What is this streaming video stuff and why is it so attractive to us?
BT: Well, this is actually one of the things that hasn't changed since we talked last year, Howard. Streaming video is basically the just-in-time delivery of what will hopefully be good enough video to your computer workstation or, in the very near future, your telephone or handheld device, and it's delivered over networks by a server. The reason we are compelled to develop and use streaming video is the amount of data that's there to display just a single frame of video is larger than most people will tolerate in terms of what will be the download time or the download storage requirements, that if they were going to download the video before they started playing it back, it just would cause too many problems.
HS: That's true even for archived files. Even if we had an archive file, the fact that we want to see it in some reasonable amount of time means we really want to use streaming technology.
BT: Absolutely. There's some downsides to this, too, but-�
HS: Tell us!
BT: Well, the downside with streaming video, if you're depending upon it, is it's making an assumption that our networks are good enough and smart enough and helpful enough to us to accomplish this just-in-time delivery of a video stream that's probably being buffered only five or ten seconds before it would kind of run out of gas in terms of being able to keep the full motion video going for you.
HS: And that means if it does, we're just going to see jerky kind of motion and funny sound.
BT: Yep, all of a sudden you're going to have dropouts or you know, [inaudible] on the screen.
HS: What are dropouts?
BT: Dropouts are where what's been smooth video, it all of a sudden starts to look jerky, or what's most frustrating for anybody using streaming video is if you start getting dropouts or gaps in the audio quality or actual audio sound. That really destroys our ability to make good human use of streaming video. Other things that could happen in terms of streaming video is the network server could go down. Maybe the network gets too congested on your particular leg of the network and you don't have a switched Ethernet connection. So we're in some ways dancing with the devil or making assumptions that our colleagues in the networking groups on our campuses are going to be able to keep up persistent high-quality networks for us.
HS: Do campuses have the infrastructure in place right now to do this? Or do most people have good enough networks and good enough servers and things?
BT: I think the answer for that is that most universities who have been in the business of developing their campus network for the last ten years, many of them have gone to either-like Northwestern, to either a fast gigabit Ethernet backbone and perhaps they are like Northwestern - in the earlier 90's, they wired the residence halls and offices with what we call shared Ethernet and many campuses are now doing what Northwestern recently accomplished, which is upgrading all of our residence halls and most of our offices to switched Ethernet. And it's this switched Ethernet which is kind of an assured ten megabit pipe to your office that really opens up the playing territory for delivering very, very good video.
HS: So that's really all we need. If we have a switched ten megabit to some computer somewhere, then this streaming video stuff works fine, is what you're saying.
BT: That gives you a lot to play with in terms of the different types of video resources and standards that are being used out there now. Now, our geeks can always find, as I say, "Give me ten megabits and I'll start pushing MPEG 2 or playing [inaudible]."
JB: They'll push more down there.
BT: High definition television, and then they'll want 100 or more. But I think the sweet spot for having extensive use of video on campus networks, as Joel Mambretti and I kind of suggested last year really is ten megabits switched Ethernet to the desktop. That does an awful lot.
JB: And actually then, Bob, you're saying that if you've got that, you can do almost anything. But then the other half of that says that even if you don't have that much, there's still a lot you can do, from what you're saying.
BT: Yes, there's still a lot you can do. I think that should be kind of the architectural vision of where most campuses want to be very soon, with switched ten to desktops, and it's really a commodity network development now. But don't give up if you've got shared Ethernet or even if you've got less than that.
HS: Okay, you've been talking a little bit about some of the technical hurdles to doing this, but if there are others, maybe you could mention them. But also, could you talk about some of the legal, cultural or social hurdles to doing this kind of thing?
BT: Well, it's been interesting. In preparing for the talk today, I was sort of thinking back where we were at a year ago. I think we talked last - we did a Tech Talk on streaming or digital video in February of last year.
JB: Yep, it was exactly that.
BT: Networks have gotten better and to my surprise, some of the types of video that last year I said didn't look too good to me have gotten a lot better. Everything has gotten cheaper and the hardest issues remain. There are issues of copyright or permission to use that still are major challenges to developing large and useful resources of video content to stream. There are all sorts of pedagogical issues that those of us who are involved with instructional technologies or distance learning efforts or distributed learning efforts, to think about what's the mix and the proper use of digital video in learning environments. What type of mix with web-based text and image and what type of course management systems are these going to fit in? [inaudible] technological.
HS: What kind of people do we need to do that kind of stuff? I mean, do web designers do that? It sounds like that might be a more specialized area than what your typical web designer guy gets involved in.
BT: Well, we need to bring together web designers and network specialists and video specialists, but at the heart of it, this is a pedagogical issue. The best folks on your campus, including your faculty, need to be exploring different ways to use video and be figuring out what's most important for that particular institution or their particular class or their objective.
BT: Bob, what about - I think a lot of people, you know, thought about this streaming video, that they would go ahead and actually videotape lectures and either send them, broadcast them out in real time synchronously and other times, start thinking about storing these. Are you at Northwestern doing either of those applications in this area?
BT: That's not our primary, I think, kind of targets here. Although we are looking where, for example, in our School of Business which coordinates and manages some executive management programs, both in Europe and in the Pacific Rim. Our faculty members get weary of jumping on planes and just accommodating their schedules to be in far-flung cities so we are looking at both live videoconferencing services as well as stored video that can supplement or replace some of those in-person activities.
But in general, I think the types of learning resources, learning systems we're going to be putting in place is not going to be as simple as taking a current lecture that's being delivered in a classroom or live environment, shooting it, encoding it and then just streaming it to people. I just don't think that's going to be good enough and competitive enough with what we are beginning to see other, more imaginative and more interesting learning environments created that also use video.
HS: When you say competitive enough, it sounds like we're competing against companies and things and when you say that, are you talking about competing with other, like, distance learning options?
BT: Yes. I think that over the next five years, there's going to be more and more competition, either by single universities or consortiums of universities deciding to band together to develop these professional education markets, these executive development markets. We're already seeing this happen.
HS: But how do you answer the argument that a lot of universities have brilliant professors, they're not going to be around forever, and wouldn't it be a good idea to take their wonderful lectures, record them and archive them so that students in the future - I mean, in your own university could see them?
BT: I think that's a very interesting question, Howard. I think there's all sorts of issues associated with that that are just beginning to get contested. If you read the Chronicle of Higher Education you might have seen, it's already come out of the course management system efforts at some universities as to who at the end of the quarter has the right to re-use, say, Professor Hutchinson's anthropology course materials.
HS: Okay, and you're not going to tell us that, are you? You don't have the answer.
BT: I don't have the answer for that. And I'm just a humble technology servant, helping to make all sorts of possibilities happen here.
JB: [inaudible], what about, I think sometimes we get kind of seduced into thinking that we have to use really large segments of video. You know, it turns out the web in some respects has encouraged us to really think it more in terms of bits and clips and smaller segments of stuff. Can you - do you see that as a trend that will maybe help us sort through some of these issues?
BT: Well, I think instructors, faculty members and learning technology designers are going to be looking at that in all sorts of courses. I don't have any easy answers for the. We at Northwestern have developed with the University of Illinois and with the Northwestern chemistry faculty a handbook, and it's one of the links that's on the CREN Tech Talk website, to a handbook or an archive of short video clips to help both chemistry instructors and students prepare for or refresh themselves about different laboratory techniques. And clearly, this is more useful to have it segmented into very small kind of training examples or modules.
I saw on the Fathom site-and this is another link. This is this consortium of several universities, the British Library, Columbia University, the London School of Economics, the University of Michigan and University of Washington to be doing online courses. At that Fathom site, there's a wonderful video that was done last month at Columbia University with Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch on a jazz retrospective on Louis Armstrong. And it actually was about an hour, hour and a half long presentation and they divided that clip up into some different topics between five and ten minutes long.
JB: How interesting!
BT: But for different situations, the way we re-purpose and re-use video right now, I think we're making decisions about, okay, we're going to divide this clip or this presentation up into some two minute clips and some five minute clips, largely by topic. In the future, we're going to have wonderful opportunities to be searching by indexing methods and more malleable forms of digital video that mean we won't sort of have to make these beforehand decisions about how we're going to break up the video and we'll have much more flexibility in terms of how video clips are used by different communities at different times for their instructional needs.
HS: Could you talk a little bit more about indexing and searching? I understand that when you encode video right now, that you can put little index words at various points so that people can hop to things. What's happening in the indexing and searching kind of area?
BT: Yeah, I'm probably not a deep expert on this, but there are a couple of available technologies that are beginning to be used for this and there's a standards group that's doing some work in this that I'll mention that I think is going to be really interesting to watch. One of the current technologies that's helping with indexing and more flexible use of video is called SMIL, or Smile. It was developed, version 1 was developed a couple years ago as a standard and I believe that version 2 either just recently or is about to be ratified. And SMIL stands for Synchronized Multimedia Interactive Language. And what it basically does is allow the people, the video specialists and the learning technologists who are involved with the production of the video before it's put up on the server to mark it or tag it in various ways for at least some of the attributes that are there in the video. And then this allows both synchronization of video with non-video resources such as related text. It will eventually allow us to do much more imaginative uses and linking of our video clips to other types of web resources.
HS: Okay, can we turn to some applications of streaming video? What about live events? Should we be capturing and streaming live events? We have some famous senator or movie star or whatever comes to campus or we have a sporting event on campus or something like that.
BT: Well, yes, I think most universities are deciding that this is either near term or right now something that they want to be able to do.
HS: Is that hard to do?
BT: Well, yes and no.
JB: You sound like a politician!
BT: Well, it's hard to do in terms of [inaudible] width and then it all seems rather easy. Why is it hard? It's not hard in terms of the computer technology or the network technology. You can, with-I'm going to call them the Big Three, those kind of three big systems out there now in terms of companies that are actively delivering to you and your university real streaming systems, and that's Apple with QuickTime, RealNetworks with Real and Microsoft with their Windows Media Streaming efforts. And all of these technologies are capable of streaming live events and the things that you have to pay attention to in terms of delivering over a network good feed of a live event is similar to what you have to do with any AV crew would have been doing 20 years ago in terms of supporting that event. You've got to mike it properly so that the presenters can be heard. You've got to light it properly so that they can be seen and those are the basic things. Then you make decisions as to whether one camera is sufficient or whether you need two or three cameras to really match the gravity of the event or the importance of different types of material that's being presented at the event.
HS: And every time we talk about a camera, we're talking about a human being holding it. So [inaudible] lots of people.
BT: In most cases. Now, there are rooms that are being used in corporations and universities that either let one technician control, pan, zoom two or three cameras, or there are even rooms that are completely automated. You can walk into certain types of technology-assisted rooms and you put kind of a wireless mike and what's basically a marking device on your sport coat and the camera will be following that device as you walk around in the stage area. I think a lot of people find that the type of single-camera, automatic panning and zooming technology that you get there results in a pretty flat product.
HS: Do universities need studios to record some material? I mean, is there a use for having a video studio where you produce some stuff? Would you need that, for example, if you were going to do distance learning, or are there other reasons you'd need a studio?
BT: Yeah, I think any school or university that's beginning to get beyond the first stage of prototyping and is getting serious about distance learning is probably going to want to set up a classroom that's really well-equipped to without a lot of muss and fuss capture video of the presentation in that classroom. I know that Dennis Glenn, who's manager of my Advanced Media Production Studio is prototyping or pricing one of these out with our School of Business that's getting more serious about streaming video to international locations. I know that Dennis was also recently in Ann Arbor at the Internet 2 offices helping them just kind of adjust and tune both the lighting and audio and other capabilities of-well, they would probably call it a conference room but in a way, they're really beginning to look at this conference room as a studio from which they can reach Internet 2 universities with different types of educational events.
JB: It certainly would be a good time to ask our listeners to send in some questions. We've got a few on tap here, but remind folks, send in your questions for Bob at expert@cren.net.
BT: Yeah. Howard, while we're waiting for a question, I think I want to go back to an earlier question about indexing. In addition to this SMIL technology, there is an important MPEG group and the MPEG groups are from the motion picture engine, basically, industry and they've done a lot of good work in establishing different international standards. But one of the newest MPEG working groups is called MPEG-7 and this MPEG-7 working group is not a new compression, format or streaming kind of format, but instead is looking at how to describe the content in video to make it much more easier for databases and search engines to get to the particular portions of the video in the future that people will want to.
JB: If people wanted to know more about that, Bob, is there a website or a group?
BT: Yeah, for all of this, you can do a googol search on MPEG-7, but there's also a canonical website, www.mpeg-7.com and this has a very interesting set of resources that are updated pretty frequently on what's happening in this working group. I just checked there today and there's actually a fascinating article there that's on the MPEG-7.com site. It's the newest article from Neil Day. It's called "MPEG-7: Daring to Describe Content." And it sounds like an English Ph.D. who's come out of a deconstruction program, but it actually is a wonderful article.
HS: Sounds like practical people won't be able to read it.
JB: We'll need those ideas, won't we?
BT: It is not a dry article and it seems nicely formatted, so take a look at that article by Neil Day. I was reading it yesterday. I think it's very good.
HS: Do you know of any instructional technology type applications? Are people using this streaming video in interesting ways in instructional technology?
BT: We have some links up there, but I also, in terms of getting ready for the presentation today and thinking back where we were at last year, I'd have to say that the technology keeps on bubbling up with faster, cheaper, better, really fascinating new technologies that we can put to use.
But I don't really think that universities have figured out in the way that we have figured out with digital text and then digital images and then digital audio just during the last couple years how to really best exploit digital video and I don't think digital video has yet become what I would call a core technology as these other formats are for universities. I think that this is happening, but it's happening more slowly partly because it takes a broader alliance of IT folks at campuses to make video streaming work matter-of-factly. Partly because there's very imposing intellectual property right or copyright issues associated with great video content. And it's just a new medium that we're learning how to assemble the experts on campus to best work with faculty members upon.
HS: What about in teaching people foreign languages? It seems like this technology would be absolutely wonderful, that you could have interactive video in a foreign language setting.
BT: Right. Yeah, one of the things that streaming video is really good for in foreign language is bringing to the learning experience more material that suggests the different inflections, accents, the cultural issues that are embedded in foreign language learning. Now, frankly, in some ways, audio is better for some of the rote, kind of early language acquisition skills because typically the buffering time before you start up an audio stream is shorter than the buffering time for launching a video stream. So for stuff where you need instant feedback, it's either locally based video clips or audio that in many cases serves people's purposes better.
If people who are listening to this Tech Talk who are at Internet 2 universities want to try connecting to the CSPAN site that's mentioned as a high bandwidth experiment that's being conducted by CSPAN along with the International Center for Advanced Internet Research here at Northwestern, in terms of multicasting a high quality CSPAN channel feed, I encourage them to check that out and see whether they can actually get this multicasting of a high quality broadcast channel to their own desktop. We have this working rather well on the Northwestern campus and I was talking with Howard right before we started the talk today, and he's in Princeton. And he said this was streaming full screen video, too, with very good audio. And I've been watching the Senate hearings during the last couple weeks with Gale Norton and John Ashcroft and others and it's very impressive. But what we want to do next is get other channels, PBS channels, international channels that could be used for foreign language kind of education. And I think this will happen during the next two years.
JB: Now, Bob, for somebody on campus to be able to receive that, what do they have to have on their campus network?
BT: Well, their campus needs to be connected to a high bandwidth network, either the VBNS or the Internet 2 network in order for this high bandwidth stream to get to them.
BT: And then, their campus has to also have turned on or enabled multicasting. Now, this is another term that - we'll just spend a minute on this.
JB: Okay.
BT: Basically, most uses of video on campus right now is what I would call video on demand and each time a person asks to see, say, the video clip of your president giving a state of the university speech that's sitting on a video server, each time an individual person asks for it, it launches a new video stream. With multicasting, you're able to much more efficiently deliver to very large populations over good networks a high bandwidth video stream, but at least over the backbone, you're not propagating these multiple video streams. So it's work that needs to happen with the networking services group and the video specialists at universities. But in order not to saturate our backbone with multiple copies of the same video, we need to get this down pat at our universities of supporting multicasting. And if you go that CSPAN site, you will have an opportunity to see whether your own university is supporting multicasting at least to your office.
JB: And don't you think that we're going to get all these nice calls from all the networking and video folks saying, "Oh, wait, what did you do?"
HS: Right. By the way, it was very, very impressive. I did look at the thing and I want people to know that I do not watch the Senate hearings during the day. I only do this on my own time.
JB: At lunchtime, right?
HS: After working my 24-hour days here. We have a couple questions here, Bob. One's from Princeton University, so I just kind of moved that up to the top tier, if I'm allowed to do that.
HS: And it's from Serge Goldstein and Serge says, "Does Bob think that desktop videoconferencing H.323 IP based videoconferencing will get off the ground in the next few years?"
BT: Oh, thank you for that question! If you had asked me that last year - and maybe we talked about it a little bit - I thought things were developing in desktop. It's more than desktop videoconferencing. We'll call it H.323 because that's the technical name for it. But this has been one of the big surprises over the last 12 months is what has happened with this area of digital video. The price point of really great conference room units or seminar room units or small classroom videoconferencing units has dropped so much during the last year and the performance of this stuff is so good that this is one area where we're worrying about how we can control and meet the demand on the Northwestern campus for faculty uses of this videoconferencing.
Let me mention the kind of typical price points - and I'm not recommending one manufacturer over another in my presentation, but I need to talk about what I know: PolyCom, which makes videoconferencing conference room or classroom units. These units a year ago might have been eight to ten to 15 thousand dollars list price. I think that if you sharpen your pencil with your vendor, you'll probably find that you can buy these units for $4,000 or less. They've really gotten to a commodity price, and if you have either a plasma display or a bright projector in a conference room or a classroom and you have a switched ten network connection, you can do really amazingly good quality and easy-to-use videoconferencing around the world.
JB: Well, the environment you described is almost room videoconferencing with desktop-based equipment.
BT: Yeah, yeah.
HS: So you could do this from your office?
BT: Yeah, for the office, I think most people would be investing at a price point of about three or four hundred dollars. The list price is still probably six or seven hundred dollars. But I think that if you find that if you insist on educational pricing, you might be able to get from either VCon or PolyCom a USB port connected desktop videoconferencing unit that is just amazing quality. I used some other types of units five years ago and eight years ago that cost four and five times that amount and I wasn't happy with the video and it really never went anywhere.
But the new H.323 video products have gotten so easy to use in terms of at least point-to-point videoconferencing, the price has gotten just so irresistible that we, with very little encouragement, now have civil engineers at Northwestern fitting up working groups with civil engineers throughout the Midwest. And these were people who didn't really want to have much to do with older videoconferencing efforts and services we put together on campus. What we're seeing happen is that this is sort of taking off and we're just trying to kind of hang on and figure out what type of university and national infrastructure needs to be built to support the increasing use amongst universities of these H.323 products.
JB: Bob, I think it was interesting when we were talking. You mentioned that the civil engineers were bridge inspectors and they couldn't leave their state for-�
BT: Yeah, that was interesting. They are civil engineers, and many cases have state kind of bridge inspector appointments and because most states want their bridges to be inspected and stay up and if anything bad happens, they want them right on site, they are on very short leashes in terms of for how long they can leave the state. And Chuck Dowding, who's our civil engineer, has wanted to work more easily and collaboratively with a number of engineers throughout the Midwest who have these positions has found that this videoconferencing is just the ticket that he needs and they need to, again, in very flexible ways work from their department conference rooms with each other.
JB: That's fascinating!
HS: We have another question here from Richard Danielson at Laurentian University. And Richard says it's an unfair question, but he's going to ask it anyway!
BT: [inaudible]�
HS: I think when you start off that way, you know we're [inaudible].
HS: He says, "If you were pushed to make a decision about one and only one of the big three - QuickTime, RealMedia, Windows Media - which one would you choose?"
JB: You can dance around that one, right?
BT: Well, I asked both the people who run our servers here at Northwestern and the people who work with video every day in our advanced media production studio. We felt the need during the last year to go beyond our kind of MPEG high bandwidth video server and expand into the area of what we call moderate bandwidth video. And that's 250 kilobits to maybe 500 kilobits, because that video has gotten so good during the last year. And I was trying to figure out whether it was an easy choice, whether it's QuickTime server or Real or Windows, and I'll tell you what we're doing next year, and that's bringing up a Windows Media server, partly because it has gotten so much better during the last year. And partly because it comes free with Windows 2000, so in the case of choosing between Windows Media streaming and Real, we are looking for a campus license of a difference between basically just a Windows server or a Windows server with maybe a ten to 15 thousand dollar Real license.
HS: If I can read something into Richard's question that probably he was never thinking of asking-�
BT: I didn't [inaudible] that. You'll have to explain it to me.
HS: Right. No, it seems one of the questions he's asking is, is there a need to standardize in this area? Should we do that, or is it okay to have lots of players at this point?
BT: I think we've got lots of players and that's not going to change soon. In fact, if you go to, you know, rock music sites, there's a lot of music-�
HS: Which I never do.
BT: Yeah, I don't either. It's just C-Span at night for me. But anyways, there's a lot of sites out there that are now offering trailers for movies, a lot of the MTV videos and stuff like that. You go to almost any of these Internet video sites and they will offer two formats to choose from at the site, or maybe even all three. So here at Northwestern, I know that we've got units running QuickTime servers, we've got a big IBM MPEG server, my networking group has a Real server and I'm bringing up for more of kind of a faculty support projects this year a Windows server. And I think many campuses will find that they want to have both or that they're going to have both because departments will bring it up of their own choosing.
JB: Actually, when I was at Streaming Media.com site earlier today, too, I noticed that they had a choice of all three of them there.
BT: Yeah, that's increasingly the case, so I think that most people are voting that it's not that hard with the encoding boards you can get now to encode to various formats, and particularly for Internet sites that can't control their audience, they don't want to cut out any of those formats, so increasingly they're offering all three.
HS: If this streaming video becomes a more important part of what universities offer, are people sitting at home with their 56 kb modems going to be able to participate in this?
BT: They're not going to get - for a while at least - what we would call really good video. I'm impressed that you can get anything at 56K and I'm grateful when the audio comes through well. What you'll get is maybe larger than a postage stamp and you'll see it changing, but at modem speeds right now with Real, QuickTime and Windows Media, you can get really pretty good sound but it's just kind of occasionally updated frames and we at the Holocaust site that's also listed as one of the links where we are streaming MPEG 1 video and shortly going to be doing Windows Media, we've decided for modem users, we're going to offer just audio with maybe a fixed picture.
JB: That sounds good.
BT: Now, there's a very, very interesting development called MPEG 4 that's is targeting lower bandwidth video and this sounds like magic to me. In fact, over much of the last year I've been reading with my young daughter all the Harry Potter books, and to me MPEG 4 sounds like one of the spellbooks or one of the magic wands.
HS: Maybe that's where Harry Potter [inaudible].
BT: But the MPEG 4 format actually comes - it was an early failure in that MPEG 4 was originally kind of thought about or designed for videophones years ago. These things that never happened because people didn't really want people dropping into their kitchens to see what was going on there. But MPEG 4 now is looking at very, very interesting new ways of looking at video and it's also looking at lower bandwidth possibilities and variable bandwidth possibilities. And a lot of the big three video streamers - QuickTime, Real and Microsoft - are also taking a careful look, at least over their shoulder, at MPEG 4 and variously saying and maybe actually subscribing to some of the format descriptions of MPEG 4. But this might offer in the future video to your cell phone, to handheld devices, to decent video over wireless networks.
HS: Okay, we're getting toward the end of our broadcast so perhaps we could talk about what needs to happen on campuses to move toward effective use of this streaming video technology.
BT: Well, it's nothing new, but my advice is, one, to do the alliance building you need to do across campuses, between various IT units, library units. If you aren't all reporting to one director and kind of approaching your development of video service together, you need to find a way to do that because video can get interrupted in so many different ways at a network level, at a server shop level or it can be a great technological resource but nothing of compelling interest to the campus if there aren't either the learning technology specialists or the librarians acquiring and licensing the content. So the first advice is to build your alliances because you have to in order to put in place both the technology and the various effective services for use of digital video in higher education.
HS: Okay, we have two more questions that have come in. One is from an ex-Princeton person, Michael [inaudible], who is now at Georgetown University.
JB: They have to stop getting the Princeton folks all that press, Howard.
HS: I've got to. Otherwise I don't get to do this job!
JB: Okay.
HS: I'll have an office in the stairwell somewhere. Okay, probably Michael can still do that to me.
HS: Okay, Michael from Georgetown, who was at Princeton for a while, says, "Can Bob give his view of the 323 world and authentication/authorization issues, directions, and his perspective as to how these issues might be addressed?"
BT: Well, I think Michael knows that there's a lot of work awaiting him here in terms of how particularly H.323 becomes a critical and it needs to become a secure and controlled resource that's used within universities and between universities. There's a lot of work that needs to be done and we're at a very, very immature stage in terms of what's both kind of directory services for people to figure out how to connect with the people that they want to around the world, how to know that they are only connecting with those people, how to manage this on a much larger scale is going to need the middleware efforts that Michael contributes to and that Ken Klingenstein, who's head of the Internet2 middleware group I know are going to be paying attention to. In fact, we had a videoconference here at Northwestern on Tuesday and Ken dropped into this conference as we were looking at various issues that really need to be addressed by the middleware developers at universities to respond to what most of us just know is going to be a mushrooming use of H.323 videoconferencing units at universities.
JB: So you're talking really about if I have H.323, how do I really reserve enough bandwidth for it to really work, right?
BT: Well, that's an example, but also in the middleware area, how can we do this securely? You know, if you're having maybe a Board of Trustees meeting at your university, you may want to be able to assure your Board that it's only the board members who are listening and watching and participating in that conference. There's the way in which we connect or find the right "dialing instructions" for other H.323 units at other universities right now. It's kind of like the early days of the telephone. You jot down numbers of, you know, IP addresses of other locations but these change from day to day, so there's various ways through either what are called management of MCU's, which are kind of the conference bridges, at which point H.323 videoconferences meet and white pages directories that a lot of work is just beginning on this. There will be, I think, a lot of both working group discussion and reports at the March meeting of the Internet2 group or the project in Washington, DC, and for all the universities that are listening in today who are members of Internet2-�
HS: Bob is actually inviting you to come down there.
BT: Well, I encourage you to register for the conference. I think during the next year in the Internet2 project the management of H.323 video is going to be a very important and kind of a high profile project.
JB: Okay, Howard, I have to ask. Did you miss the question from S. Davies at Mount Royal College in Calgary?
HS: No, it's just that S. Davies doesn't send me paychecks!
JB: Well, I hope we take note of this.
HS: Let's talk to S. Davies, Stephen Davies, at Mount Royal College in Calgary, and don't worry, folks from Princeton who are sending questions in. We will get to them! You can be sure.
BT: I will personally answer them with Howard afterwards.
HS: This is from Stephen Davies, Mount Royal College in Calgary. He says, "I'm interested in setting up a workstation to add a URL to sections of stored digital video. Is there one�" He says one. "One [inaudible] software for streaming video which is looking more dominant in the market?"
BT: If you look at the market share and the reports that are out there during the last six months, the Real is the company that probably has the most, I guess, players or eyeballs on people's computers around the country. During the last year, year and a half, Microsoft has come from being kind of a disparaged player in this area to very, very competitive and is gaining rapid market share and frankly doing a lot of things right. They are supporting the MPEG 4 format, at least it looks like they're intending to. They are doing a lot of work with XML, a data model that is going to be important for indexing in the future. But as Judith noted, if you go to a hot Internet site right now that's delivering video, you'll probably see all four of those big Three formats being delivered. And if you've already got a license for one of them, I'd just stick with that for now.
JB: Now, let me ask what might be a dumb question. Would the answer be the same when we're talking about actually editing software, or is that-�
BT: Well, the video editors have very strong preferences to the particular machines that they are working on, but there's now a very strong Macintosh community for doing video editing and there's a very strong and growing PC community, so you can do good work on either one. I'm the type of person who's sort of gone from Macs to PC's, Linux machines, and keeps on going around, so I don't have any religious feelings about this, but sometimes your design professionals do and you want to try to accommodate their sensitivities.
HS: I think we have really only time for one more question, but I would like to acknowledge that we have what looks like a very good link from Charles Hintz. He really doesn't have a question, but he sent us a good link. We appreciate that, Charles. We have a question from Princeton University, Serge Goldstein asks, "Does Bob think that the model done with streaming - Real, QuickTime, Windows Media - will eventually catch up to MPEG 2 in quality? What about MPEG 4?"
BT: Well, the moderate bandwidth video has-to my surprise, and I'm again acknowledging that it's gotten much better during the last year-it's beginning to approach or-as long as you don't click it to full screen-it's beginning to approach the type of quality we see with MPEG 1 and MPEG 1 is the type of video that you typically find on CD-ROM's now. I don't think MPEG 2 is, those advocates are worried about video quality being approached by these moderate bandwidth technologies. MPEG 2 is actually the framework under which high definition television is being built and it's the broadcast industry standard. If you have one of these 18-inch satellites on your home for DirectTV or one of the other satellite services, that's MPEG 2 that you're getting delivered. And if you get a DVD ROM, that's MPEG 2. And I don't see that 500 kilobit stuff approaching what you can do in the MPEG 2 realm, but it's pretty amazing with what's being talked about and what we're seeing year by year with brilliant new encoding schemes that let us do better video in lower bandwidths.
JB: Okay, I think that we are getting close. Howard, do you want to just mention the comment, perhaps, from Hal Meeks on whether or not we have to choose between streaming formats?
HS: Okay, yes. Hal Meeks says that, "Note that RealMedia 8.5 supports RTSP" - whatever that is.
BT: Yeah.
HS: "A standardized way for streaming content. RealMedia and Apple signed an agreement awhile back where RealMedia 8.5 server will support QuickTime streaming and subsequently MPEG 1 and eventually 2 content. The client will still need to have both RealMedia and QuickTime player installed, however."
BT: Yes.
HS: I think, have we gotten all the questions? I think we have.
JB: I think either we have - all that I have seen come in, although I suspect that folks have lots more questions. And Bob, we may have to have you back again.
BT: Why, I'd love to, Judith. This is a fascinating field, to see how it's developing. It's really time, though, for the people who are the learning technology experts to really begin to take digital video seriously as a resources that's not that darn expensive to work with. Students are coming into our universities who have experienced this from their elementary or high schools and as Ira Fuchs said in kind of the preamble that you put up on the Tech site, "Universities need to get ready for this."
JB: Well, that's right. We didn't talk earlier today about the students and how they just think this is a real normal kind of thing and they just expect to see it and use it all the time.
BT: Well, they're very comfortable with it and I don't see-�
HS: So that means we've got to get comfortable with it really quickly.
BT: Yes.
JB: Yeah, I think so.
BT: But there will be certain universities or some of these distance learning efforts that'll find how to use it in very effective ways and I don't see this as merely a defensive or reactive action, but it's a resource that's now ready to be explored in terms of its pedagogical potential at universities. There's a lot of interesting work that I hope will get done during the next couple years in that area.
JB: Okay. Howard, a final comment?
HS: Bob, looking out at the horizon now, is there anything just over the horizon? I mean, when you come back next year, is there going to be some new wonderful thing you're going to tell us a lot about?
BT: I'm not sure I've been that prescient in terms of exactly what's just over the horizon. I was surprised by how well the moderate bandwidth video has gotten during the last year and although I knew that videoconferencing was coming, I didn't know how fast it was coming.
HS: So do you think that this time next year, there's going to be lots and lots of universities are going to be doing this videoconferencing stuff, for example?
BT: I think that videoconferencing is going to happen more quickly than will the-in some ways more imaginative uses or the integrated use of stored video and large video collections into universities.
HS: Is that going to affect our travel budgets, Bob?
BT: No, we're going to go to middleware conferences on how to manage all this! I would love to be surprised a year from now on how fast MPEG 4 applications are developing and I encourage people to-one of the ways to get really interesting work on MPEG 4 is to go to the www.vide.net. That's a consortium of universities that are looking at video initiatives. They have out a call for information on MPEG 4 to the different MPEG 4 developers and have a wonderful kind of white paper or document there on what they think is the potential for MPEG 4. And I wouldn't bet the house that we're going to have this in a year or two, but it's really fascinating.
HS: We have you archived now!
BT: Yeah, I forgot. We'll come back and see.
JB: We'll come back and see, right. Okay. Well, then, I think it's time for our closing notes. Be sure to plan on joining us two weeks from today when our special guest expert will be Michael Sperberg-McQueen from the W3C consortium answering your questions about what are likely to be your best uses for XML in the future.
Many thanks to all of our CREN member institutions who support these Tech Talks and thanks to all the Tech Talk team who really helped put this event together today. A special thanks to our Tech Talk expert, Bob Taylor; to technology anchor, Howard Strauss; to Terry Calhoun, who kept up to date with adding all those websites to our website event page; to Jason Russell, Gayle Terkeurst and the support team at Merit; to Susie Berneis, who is the audio file transcriber; and finally, thanks to all of you for being here and I understand we had folks from both Notre Dame and Penn State joining us, so thanks to all of you and for all the questions. You were here because it's time. Good-bye, Bob. Bye, Howard.
HS: Bye, Judith. Bye, Bob.
JB: Take care. See you all in two weeks.
BT: Bye.
HS: Bye-bye.
JB: Bye-bye.
END OF WEBCAST
