DC’s VOD
By Dan Westman and Darryl D. Anderson
District of Columbia
Office of Cable Television and Telecommunications
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.