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Southeast Community College: Building the Video Campus, One Brick at a Time
11/26/2002
In
southeast Kentucky, a small community college is on the forefront of a movement
to make video recording, production and distribution a simple and practical
option in the educator's toolkit. Southeast Community College, one of five campuses
in the Kentucky Community and Technical College System, is using a new video
multicasting technology that allows it to convert classrooms into video-production
facilities capable of producing and pumping video throughout the entire college
system.
Southeast CC, which offers classes in broadcasting and telecommunications, has a new full-blown television studio. The faculty there is now using "video appliances" from VBrick Systems to distribute video signals from the television studio into campus classrooms, to send conventional television and cable throughout the campus LAN, and to turn any classroom into its own television studio.
"We already had videoconferencing technology," said Charlie Simpson, Southeast Community College director of technology. "What we lacked was the ability to stream video from our television studio to our [interactive TV] network. Now … we can plug in a camera and microphone system and create a television studio in any of our classrooms, theatres or laboratories. We take the information, pump it across the network into the studio and then decide how we want to distribute it, whether it's across the IP network or across the Web."
Each of the five campuses has a LAN. On the main campus at Southeast, material is distributed throughout the LAN from the television studio. Because the other campuses don't have a television studio to distribute the signal, the video is routed on the existing interactive TV backbone, a T1 line. Once the material is received at the other campuses, it is distributed to the desktop via that campus's LAN. "VBrick allows us to bring a signal from the TV studio to the classrooms on the other campuses and also allows us to distribute television and cable," says Simpson. "We're transmitting out of the classrooms as if they were TV studios."
VBricks are a family of network appliances or "video bricks," video-on-demand systems, and related components for one-way or two-way television over IP, ATM, and T1/E1 networks. The technology supports IP multicast for transmitting and receiving MPEG audio/video.
In multicast networking, a computer d'es not send its traffic to another computer. Rather, it sends it to a special address whose physical location is inside a router or switch. A multicast client can then inform the router that it wants to receive a multicast stream. When informed, the router replicates the traffic to that client and to all other clients wanting to join the session.
"What we've been able to do with the VBrick is to create a closed-circuit television network in our interactive classrooms," he continues. "Now we can stream video and audio across the network and provide connectivity to classrooms that didn't exist before."
That's been a benefit to Southeast CC's nursing program.
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