California State University, Monterey Bay
California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) is located on the scenic central coast and provides innovative education to students from all over California. The Information Services and Network Solutions (ISNS) department chose Microsoft Windows Media® to meet the university’s goal of using technology to reach students with relevant, informative, and interactive course materials. A unified content library enables students and faculty to manage, schedule, and view streaming content directly from their desktops. In addition, Windows Media is used to simulcast broadcast events. CSUMB deployed the Windows Media platform for its scalability, reliability, and lower media delivery costs.
Since opening its doors to 600 students in 1995, California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) has grown to be a significant addition to the California State University system, an institution of 23 campuses. Situated on the former Fort Ord military base, the CSUMB campus provides innovative education to students from throughout California. Currently offering 12 undergraduate majors to its 3,400 students, CSUMB aims to expand the student population to 7,500 by 2010.
One of the university’s goals, as defined in its Vision Statement, is to serve students by using technology throughout its academic programs to deliver relevant, informative, and interactive course materials.
The Information Services and Network Solutions (ISNS) department provides the university’s students and faculty with many technical services, including data connectivity and warehousing, database design, server administration, telephone support, video conferencing, cable television and broadcast engineering, and Internet services. A significant part of the group’s responsibilities is delivering streaming services, which includes behind-the-scenes functions such as creating publishing and content management tools, ensuring connectivity, and providing streaming support to students and faculty who are creating academic and cultural content targeted to fellow students, the community, and the entire world. The ISNS department is the primary test location for streaming media and is constantly seeking improved methods to better serve its student and faculty customers.
CSUMB needed a streaming solution that not only would meet its technology goals, but also would allow content creators to easily deliver and manage streaming content, use capabilities from an existing cable system, offer scalability to the technical staff, and do it all within budget constraints.
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CSUMB chose Windows Media to support its streaming media needs, and deployed it throughout the entire campus.
The ISNS department operates nine Microsoft Windows 2000 Servers running Windows Media to stream live and on-demand events using multicast and unicast through an Internet connection. In partnership with USA Media, LLC, CSUMB operates a digital two-way cable system that provides high-speed data access to the entire campus community. Student films, faculty broadcasts, a student-run Internet radio station, a lecture series, and special current event broadcasts are encoded using the Windows Media Encoder 7.1 and delivered to the university community.
The ISNS department created a unified content library for the university so students and faculty can manage, search, schedule, and view streaming media through a Web-based media gateway. Users complete a Web form and upload the media content to a processing area of the data warehouse. Based on the parameters specified in the Web form, the content is encoded into Windows Media and MPEG-2 formats. These encoded files are placed in the unified content library, a record of attributes is added to a Microsoft SQL Server™ database, and the media is listed on the media gateway Web page. Once content is available in the database, users can access this database from their desktops and use Windows Media Player to view content. CSUMB students and faculty use this system to create custom programming play lists to broadcast to one of three community cable channels and other partner cable providers throughout the region.
Many CSUMB departments use Windows Media to simulcast satellite broadcast events. The Teledramatic Arts and Technology (TAT) program produces the Global WakeUpCall, a biannual live broadcast that focuses on global studies from an alternative media perspective. CSUMB is one of the producers of Ready2Net—live satellite television and Webcast programs that bring the education and vendor communities together to discuss cutting-edge issues regarding the use of technology in academia. Ready2Net won three awards during the 2001-2002 academic year: The Shirley Davis Award of Excellence in Teleconferencing, and two awards at the 20th Annual TeleCon Awards. The Panetta Lecture Series, a C-SPAN-style event produced through the Leon and Sylvia Panetta Institute for Public Policy, invites well-known guests from around the world to discuss current events in a public forum.
"Incorporating Windows Media into the delivery of these broadcast events enables viewers from outside of the area to watch these broadcasts," says Matthew Galvin, media engineer in the ISNS department.
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According to Galvin, Windows Media provides CSUMB with the ability to deliver streaming and broadcast events with lower media delivery costs, improved reliability, greater interoperability, and higher quality compression.
CSUMB’s Windows Media-based solutions have proved to be the best method for deploying video and audio learning materials to its students. The competing delivery methods did not offer the degree of scalability or ease of use that CSUMB desired. The ease with which CSUMB can deploy Windows Media-based servers has reduced total cost of ownership for streaming servers, and the wide array of support hardware is a major advantage. The Windows Media Encoder 7 technology allowed the ISNS staff to deploy numerous streaming sites both on and off campus that are equipped to encode media for streaming and broadcast.
Using the Windows Media playback system has saved more than $50,000 by eliminating the need to purchase expensive content-scheduling applications. The students and faculty have responded positively to the content delivery mechanism and have found the tool to be easy to use and reliable.
CSUMB owns and operates its own cable system. As a result, CSUMB can extend the high-speed cable network to the entire campus community. This allows integration of streaming services and broadcast services into one unified system.
"We built a unique system that allows us to incorporate our existing cable system and Windows Media services to create an efficient, low-cost content delivery solution,” Galvin says. “Windows Media has been successful for us because it’s stable and robust, it supports a lot of users, it’s cost effective, and easy to deploy. It’s necessary for CSUMB to be able to offer the best solution to our students and faculty so we can reach the community."
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