EDUCAUSE: Evolving Technologies Committee HeadsUp Re Digital Video

Digital video is on the close horizon for most colleges and universities, and some are already well into trying to leverage its potential while at the same time managing its demand for resources. The good news is that this technology brings exciting and positive enhancements to higher education. The bad news is that digital video will pose significant challenges for our networks and infrastructure. Digital video is a very large topic and the purpose of this brief paper is simply to alert those who are not familiar with this technology that it 1) is an important development for higher education 2) will impact university networks whether they are prepared or not and 3) will require your time now to develop a strategy to support and manage it.
 
Simply put, digital video is the presentation, distribution and storage of video image and related audio in binary form. Digital video can be created from the conversion of a pre-existing analog video signal. It can also be created directly from original material. Highly desirable characteristics are:

1) digital video can be more easily manipulated for random access, non-linear editing, compression and interactive applications than analog video;
2) each copy, or generation, of digital video is identical to the parent; there is no quality loss from generation to generation.
3) digital video can be distributed electronically over a network.

 
Applications using digital video that are currently in use or under development, and of particular interest to higher education include:

1) interactive communication�videoconferencing
2) one-to-many video communication�multicasting
3) live real-time communication
4) Web-based information on demand
5) faculty research collaboration
6) faculty "team teaching" collaboration
7) enhanced classroom instruction
8) enhanced student coursework
9) distance/distributed education; continuing studies
10) real time and asynchronous client service
11) staff training
12) entertainment

 
Unquestionably, digital video is an attractive tool for higher education. There are, however, a number of obstacles in the way of enterprise-wide implementation. Five significant challenges are required bandwidth, quality of service (QoS), hardware and software costs, standards for interoperability and intellectual property:

1) Digital video is possible at 28.8Kbps, but it is not especially appealing. More realistically, basic academic applications require 200+ Kbps for video streaming to 384Kbps for videoconferencing. To provide appropriate quality, advanced applications can require more than 1.5Mbps (MPEG) to over 2Gbps (HDTV). There are techniques to help manage bandwidth demand, including multicasting, caching and controlled content distribution. But providing bandwidth on campus to support a large number of simultaneous video applications will still be a major issue for many institutions, as will funding bandwidth to access video off the campus.

2) Bandwidth is not the only challenge for high performance video. As Jadd Cheng of the Giga Information Group observes "�the greatest inhibitor is the Internet Protocol (IP) as a transmission protocol for streaming video. IP's inability to provide reliable Quality of Service (QoS)�in the form of control over delay, packet loss and jitter�can mean degraded streaming media quality even in circumstances where bandwidth is plentiful."1To realize its full potential, then, digital video awaits QoS development and implementation. Obviously, this is an issue not only for the Internet (intended to be addressed in part by IPv6), but also for campus Intranets, many of which are years from the level of technical sophistication required to efficiently support wide use of digital video applications.

3) While the cost of hardware (e.g., servers, encoding boards) drop, licensing and maintenance fees for streaming video applications can be expensive. These costs can make individual implementation of streaming video unreasonable and increase the requirements for a centralized service. The dropping cost of IP videoconferencing equipment makes this digital video application more easily installed, but more difficult to control/monitor in a campus environment.

4) Standards to support interoperability are also a challenge. Inter-campus and intra-campus implementation of digital video on any significant scale will not be possible until the "same client/same server" requirement/problem is solved. The H.323 protocol has addressed this issue for IP videoconferencing and vendors are beginning to collaborate on streaming video applications.

5) Intellectual property�especially copyright issues, currently very much in the press�complicate the deployment of any digital video infrastructure. The application of copyright laws to digital content, including video, is likely to change substantially in this decade, as the meanings of "copy" and "fair use" are interpreted to reflect the realities of digital technology. In the interim we have to cope with a confusing tangle of inconsistent and incomplete legal decisions that affect the content universities will want to distribute on their campuses.

One can argue that the greatest challenge for colleges and universities is that the marketplace for video distribution is moving faster than our ability to receive and manage it. Vendors for some time have been shipping PC's that are digital ready, including video cards and cameras, processors approaching 1GHz and large disk and RAM configurations. Dot-com companies and others are using file-exchanging software, e.g. Gnutella, to make video easily available over the Internet.2 New ventures are being announced, such as the alliance between Intertainer and Akamai Technologies to deliver video-on-demand over high-speed Internet connections.3 Universities, themselves, through their own research and development, are inventing applications for use both on and off campus. Efficient management will require investment in wiring, routers, switches, management software and bandwidth access to the Internet�and also policy decisions about the rate at which a given institution is willing to focus its resources to support video tools or a burgeoning online video culture. Some institutions have taken the lead in addressing the application of digital video to the needs of higher education. Of particular note is the Video Development Initiative (ViDe), originally a collaboration of five institutions in 1998 to identify and prioritize digital video development issues for higher education. These institutions are: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Georgia Institute of Technology, North Carolina State and NYSERNet. This group has now expanded to include eight additional universities, continuing their efforts "to leverage collective resources and expertise towards removing barriers to the adoption of digital video in higher education�"4 In 1999 ViDE authored a white paper entitled "Digital Video for the Next Millennium", which many will find helpful. More information on ViDE and their efforts can be found at http://vide.utk.edu. Also of interest and assistance are

  • The Megaconference, an ongoing H.323 Internet video conference that provides an opportunity to discuss video topics with other institutions, to address technical questions and to arrange for demonstrations. Megaconference can be found at
    http://www.mega-net.net/megaconference/.
  • Ira Fuch's recent article in the May/June EDUCAUSE Review on multimedia. This article can be found at http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm00/erm003.html.
  • a recent press release from the North Carolina Research and Education Network (NCREN) about its first semester of distance learning programming using high quality digital video over the Internet. This is available at http://www.ncren.net/.
     

Prepared by:
Jan Thomson
and Jim Knox
Stanford University

EDUCAUSE

Evolving Technologies Committee

9/2000

 

_____________________

  1. Jadd Cheng, "Current Solutions to Streaming Media Over IP", Giga Information Group. 31 December 1999.
  2. John Markoff, "Disputed Software To Be Used for Online Film Distribution," The New York Times, 14 June 2000, sec. C, p. 14.
  3. Lawrence Fisher, "Alliance to Send Video-on-Demand on Web," The New York Times on the Web. 14 August 2000.
  4. Mairead Martin, "Video Development Initiative Update," 14 May 1999. Archived at:
    <http://modo.ctd.anl.gov/i2dvn/0208.html>