VOD goes to work; by Dan Sweeney
IN MOST IS. SHOPS, GRAPHICS ARE SECONDARY to text. And video, well, that's something you pop into a VCR, not broadcast over a network.
ÿÿÿ Not for Carl Banks. Where he works, image is substance--specifically, full-motion, high-resolution video that registers violent collisions of 300-pound linemen and graceful trajectories of quarterbacks' spirals. Banks, a former linebacker for the New York Giants and the Washington Redskins, is currently director of player development for the New York Jets Football Club. Game videos make up his corporate intelligence. Now, with the installation of the Jets' video-on-demand (VOD) network for accessing such videos, player development has become an online affair.
ÿÿÿ "Professional athletics has become one of the more information-intensive businesses today," says Banks from his car phone, using his celebrated dodging skills while navigating New York's congested streets. "In the era of free agency, it is vital to integrate the player into the team as quickly as possible, and that means communicating information quickly to the player. And from the management perspective, rapid access to information, particularly visual information, is crucial to the recruitment effort. Our system serves both purposes."
ÿÿÿ You may be thinking, "Yeah, sure, the NFL has a bigger budget than I do," and certainly the Jets' VOD installation represents one of the earliest uses of the technology outside the video production arena. But it's not an isolated example. Video server technology, considered somewhat experimental as recently as two years ago, has become practical as manufacturers like Silicon Graphics Inc., nCUBE, Concurrent Technologies Corp., SeaChange International Inc., Sun Microsystems Inc. and IBM Corp. have designed their servers for multiple simultaneous transmissions at high continuous data rates. At the same time, on the network side, switched Ethernet and asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) installations provide the basic infrastructure for VOD.
ÿÿÿ Until 1996, VOD was strictly a niche concept. Broadcasters used video servers for commercial insertion during television broadcasts; some retail chains employed video servers in conjunction with VSAT satellite services for broadcasting in-store videos. But with the aforementioned improvements in storage and networking, VOD is taking its first tentative steps into the enterprise. (See "It's Not Just for Meetings Anymore," )
ÿÿÿ Adventurous organizations with ample imaginations (if not budgets) are using the technology for training and educational purposes. While the U.S. military may be the leader in educational VOD systems, universities aren't far behind, employing VOD in distance-learning scenarios. In the corporate arena, Healthway Interactive Inc. in Austin, Texas, provides informational and educational services for hospitals with large patient populations and ongoing staff training needs. These organizations are in the vanguard of adding VOD to the enterprise as an adjunct to traditional training and marketing methods.
Lights, Camera, Action
Like most video-on-demand users, the Jets use a high-speed infrastructure--a combination fiber and coaxial backbone supporting Fast Ethernet speeds. A bank of Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) servers stores the videos on hard drives and transmits them to individual PCs across the network, where users access the videos in real-time through their Web browsers. The system uses custom video streaming software developed by Oracle Corp., though standard software is available from a number of vendors, including IBM.
ÿÿÿ This distribution network enables Banks to create what he calls an animated playbook. "Instead of giving the player a book to study at night and then trying to understand it the next day at practice, the video clips of the actual plays let him see exactly what he has to do," Banks explains. A joystick interface allows the player to pause or advance onscreen action with Nintendo-like agility; he can even zoom in on the individual position he is studying. "We have PCs in all our classrooms, and they let the athlete play the game, not just study it. The players love it."
ÿÿÿ The system is equally valuable to the team's scouts, notes Banks. "You start with a profile or position you want to fill: height, weight, 50-yard dash time and so on. Then you call up the prospects in the database that fit the profile and watch clips of them playing their positions. It saves a lot of time."
ÿÿÿ VOD also is a time-saver at the University of Texas at Arlington, one of the first educational institutions to adopt the technology. "We call it leveraging the professor," jokes Pete Smith, director of the university's Center for Distance Education, which installed the SGI-based system last year and administers it today. "The student can simply play the lectures back and review them without ever attending class, so class enrollment can be practically unlimited, which means more tuition dollars and more matching funds from the state. The system is more than paying for itself."
ÿÿÿ The UT system runs over a dedicated Fast Ethernet connection from a server at the school's technology center to students accessing them either on desktop PCs at the center or over the campus intranet. The supporting network is currently a closed system, with no access from off-campus or outside the dedicated network--with the exception of one remote site--though Smith says the administration is considering the possibility of additional remote sites.
ÿÿÿ Education doesn't just take place at universities, however. Some companies are using VOD to educate customers or staff. Healthway Interactive initially installed a SeaChange video file server and proprietary software in two hospitals that wanted to provide patients with a selection of prerecorded videos. SeaChange had developed its video file server for the television industry, and cable television and hotels were early users, but when Healthway investigated using the system in hospitals that wanted to show instructional videos for patient education, it developed software to facilitate the new applications.
ÿÿÿ It's not surprising that one of the largest VOD implementations in corporate America belongs to networking conglomerate 3Com Corp. at its Carrier Systems Business Unit in Skokie, Ill. "We initially used the network to distribute promotional materials and instructional videos to staff, but now we send out customer product [information] and other kinds of information as well," explains Michael Greene, manager of electronic marketing, who set up the network.
Adapting VOD to the Enterprise
The 3Com installation is unique in that it operates on SGI servers over the enterprise network, sharing capacity with files, Web servers, e-mail and still-frame graphics. According to experts, the biggest hurdle confronting widespread adoption of the technology is not lack of demand but rather the difficulty of adapting a corporate LAN or intranet to handle both real-time transmission of sound and image and traditional e-mail and file transfer applications.
ÿÿÿ The primary issue is speed. Digitally compressed MPEG-1 video, the same standard used in direct satellite broadcasts, requires a channel accommodating a constant 1.5Mbps throughput. This represents the full capacity of a single T1 telephone data line or about one-sixth the capacity of an ordinary Ethernet network, which means even a handful of simultaneous VOD users would swamp a LAN. To be usable, video has to have absolute right of way over other data, and because most LANs have no provisions for prioritizing data, traditional Ethernet is unacceptable.
ÿÿÿ To truly accommodate VOD, an ATM network is ideal. ATM was specifically developed to facilitate switched video as well as text traffic, and it allows for prioritization of data. ATM network performance is also highly predictable in the face of widely varying traffic loads, which means that video traffic is much less likely to disrupt other forms of communication. Unfortunately, ATM to the desktop is still quite expensive compared with Ethernet, and a minority of corporate LANs adhere to ATM standards.
ÿÿÿ ATM is not, however, an absolute prerequisite. "Switched Ethernet will permit VOD, and that's what most of our customers use," says Jack Battersby, president of Digital Media Solutions Inc., a North Easton, Mass.-based Web site developer specializing in the integration of the Web with databases and VOD.
ÿÿÿ Users need a dedicated server for VOD as well, capable of handling multiple simultaneous streams. Prices vary enormously, with nCUBE servers capable of outputting as many as 20,000 simultaneous streams priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and the smallest SGI servers priced at $12,000. Software to execute the video streaming function and provide control of the stream at the desktop is another expense. The VOD packages from Oracle and IBM permit VCR-like functionality at the desktop with pause, advance and timing selection.
ÿÿÿ The hardest task falls to the network administrator because real-time video imposes a host of demands on the network. This is getting easier, though. Greene notes that 3Com's SGI servers incorporate an Informix Software Inc. relational database "that allows for easy categorization of content and even assignment of specific bit rates according to need."
ÿÿÿ Director of Network Operations Ron Tuthill, who set up the New York Jets' system, and UT's Smith handled much of the system installations themselves. Tuthill notes, "If it's not an off-the-shelf solution, then it gives you a competitive advantage. A lot of our competitors would like to know how we did what we did. They'll just have to learn it on their own."
ÿÿÿ Greene insists that IS will soon be doing just that. "Ultimately it will be the cheapest way to distribute video materials in an organization," he says. "I see the day when VOD will be at every desktop in every large organization."
ÿÿÿ Smith adds that seasoned network administrators have nothing to fear from the process of putting video on the network. "When all is said and done, it's harder to produce the original video of educational materials than it is to distribute the finished product," he says. "Video-on-demand takes planning, but it's not as difficult as people think." |
