For most of its 2006 season, the football team at Ohio Wesleyan University attracted a record number of spectators not just its loyal fans but also thousands of enthusiasts for every visiting team, going well beyond the capacity of its stadium.
Standing room only? Try couchside seats. For the past year, the university has been offering streaming video of live games, and the online events have attracted local interest from those who can't attend in person, but they have also drawn fans of visiting teams to watch from home.
"As soon as we began providing this, our online message boards lit up with praise," says the university's IT director, Jason LaMar. "There were many challenges, but we consider it a success from both a technical and a marketing standpoint. The response from alumni, students, and other schools has been outstanding."
Larger sporting events draw between 70 and 100 viewers, he adds, while lectures attract about 50 online viewers.
"It's not huge viewership, but then again, we're a small school," he says. "We thought we'd have a dozen, maybe, so we've been very encouraged by the numbers."
The university now covers other campus events, such as a visit from the local orchestra. Now that OWU's technological hurdles have been largely surmounted, LaMarnotes that university officials are looking forward to expanding the program.
OWU's exploration of rich media which can be comprised of digital video, digital audio, or more commonly, a combination of both is an excursion that many IHEs are undertaking.
Less than a decade ago, there weren't many applications that would allow a nonprogrammer to create multimedia, compress a file, stream it online, and then archive it. But with a wealth of new, easyto- use tools developed within the past few years, more and more non-IT professionals are creating their own rich media projects.
"We're hearing that people from other teams and other universities are asking their schools, 'Why can't we have this?' " -Jason LaMar, Ohio Wesleyan University
Although there are still challenges when it comes to putting multimedia together, many colleges and universities are finding it's easier than ever in this era of YouTube, GoogleVideo, and MySpace to create compelling rich media projects that win cheers for more than just the football team and that reach new viewers.
Fan Base
The initiative at OWU was envisioned as a high-profile project that would appeal to prospective students, giving them a flavor of campus life, and would give parents, alumni, and others the chance to see events they couldn't attend in person.
Once the institution made a commitment to begin streaming campus events such as sports, lectures, and music performances on its website (www.owu.edu), LaMar began developing the infrastructure and decided on using Apple QuickTime as the basic platform.
The university already had a Quick- Time Streaming Server in the IT department and Apple laptops that could be used, so LaMar simply had to connect a laptop to a digital video camera and plug into the audio equipment for the stadium, and the event would be recorded.
Once the content is in the server, the media can run on any standards-compliant media player on either a Mac or a PC, as well as be played on devices such as cell phones or PDAs. Within the server's system is QTSS Publisher software, which can manage the media in a more automated way than has been done in the past. For example, it takes only a few clicks to upload the content to the server, prepare it for streaming, and publish it to a website.
Although the system has a number of advanced features, LaMar notes that there was a great deal of trial and error involved in learning to compress and optimize the video and tweak the multicasting the process by which a single piece of content such as a football game is routed from one server onto many data streams.
"Apple QuickTime seemed the easiest to implement," says LaMar. "But you still have to think about server infrastructure and how the connection is working. At this point, the tools are very advanced, but you do need some savvy on the technical end."
Learning how to archive was one crucial lesson, he adds. Rich media files aren't like Microsoft Word documents; the file sizes can be huge, necessitating a great deal of digital storage to be archived properly. The file size for every hour of footage is about 250 MB, LaMar notes. But shrinking the size of the image into a small viewing window has helped, he adds.
