Brigham Young University Adopts MEDIAEDGE from IMN and Grass Valley to improve campus communications May 4, 2010 BYU-Hawaii Customizes Grass Valley MEDIAEDGE for On-Demand Content Tuesday, 04 May 2010 21:41 In early 2009, the Media & Production department at the Laie, Hawaii campus of Brigham Young University began developing a campus-wide electronic emergency alert system that could be quickly updated and new information added at will. The plan was to implement a flexible digital signage system using flat-screen monitors located in the heaviest trafficked Points of Presence. After testing a few options, the school purchased the Grass Valley MEDIAEDGE on-demand content delivery system and can now inform students and faculty using video and text that is instantly updateable. Russell T Merrill, Director of the school’s Instructional Media & Production department, said that they have been able to customize their system to spread information rapidly and in ways that allow many people on campus to contribute to the system’s programming. Customizing with New Innovations Merrill worked with Travis Cameron, an IT engineer with consultancy firm New Age Media technologies, to program the system interface and develop the background architecture, using Java, HTML and other languages, on which students and faculty can now update the system themselves from the 25 Points of Presence locations. Now, not only can the Media department program the system for the entire campus, but also other department heads and student clubs can enter in their own information and have it instantly displayed across the entire digital signage network in minutes. Media & Production students new to the system are learning to write code for MEDIAEDGE applications fairly easily. Some of the applications developed by Merrill and his team include tying the system into several news RSS and JSON feeds that go to student’s cell phones and computers, as well as the creation of an automated web page design that facilitates constant auto-updating on every MEDIAEDGE client, such as set top boxes and computer workstations on campus from a central location. Multiple Display Options The MEDIAEDGE system at BYU-Hawaii supports five separate automated feeds posted from five different Internet sites displayed on a rotating basis, plus a live cable channel feed for Fox News, or an additional closed circuit TV feed. There’s also lower-third ticker information automated from the school’s website home page. “We’ve divided the real estate on screen and allowed our web team to input all the updating info, without the wider population knowing about it,” Merrill said, “All they care about is that the information is timely, accurate and refreshed on a continual basis.” He said installing and maintaining the digital signage system has been easy and has fostered new collaboration between school’s Media and IT groups, which resulted in smooth integration. It’s now used to display live event feeds, news, emergency info, a University Bulletin Board, community cable TV channel, new student orientation information, event announcements, branding and local company sponsorships. At BYU-Hawaii MEDIAEDGE is also used to display live video programs produced in the school’s HDTV studios with six Apple Final Cut Pro editing workstations. They’re using HTML, video, still images, and Flash media files to create a look that provides news, weather and other school-related information in a visually appealing way. Merrill said that all of the production and post facilities on campus are directly tied via fibre into the MEDIAEDGE platform. With the customized coding they have developed, there is room to grow. “When we first got the MEDIAEDGE system, we realized that you could only have one video source or one each of the various content types simultaneously onscreen, so we had to come up with our own implementations to make the system do what we needed it to do,” said Cameron. By using HTML with MEDIAEDGE, for example, they found a way to pull the school’s calendar feed from the website and crawl it across the bottom of the screen, which has been popular with students. The crawl was accomplished by writing a code script that takes the static calendar and converts it to a .txt file for display while live video and other images appear in different areas of the same screen. It provides not only calendar events, but also weather and breaking news information, which are updated every hour. New information can be displayed in a matter of minutes. Students from the Media & Communications department are learning to update the system themselves without a lot of effort. Campus-Wide Messaging Spread across 10 buildings on campus, the school has installed 13 MEDIAEDGE set top box clients and a dozen software-only clients running on desktop computers. They’ll eventually install some outdoor monitors displaying from the MEDIAEDGE system and put a set top box in every classroom to use the MEDIAEDGE system for on-demand content delivery, with unlimited fast forward/play/rewind functionality. These players are fed by an IBM Blade Centre server with 5 TB of storage capacity, enabling them to store and serve hundreds of hours of HD video material. The system is housed at the University Data Centre on campus and is tied into the school’s 40 TB editing SAN, providing direct access to the MEDIAEDGE display system from multiple locations on campus, and talks with the HD Television Studio control room router and FCP Edit bays. Merrill said content creation includes the FCP workstations as well as ATTO and Quantum storage arrays that are used in tandem with multiple Linux, Windows and Apple operating systems in one workflow. The Media department is using a second channel of MEDIAEDGE to feed the school’s local cable TV service. Once a student’s video production is competed, it is digitized into the MEDIAEDGE system and placed in a window on screen for viewing. New programs are produced and displayed every week. At each POP, a viewer can switch back and forth between the cable TV channel, with full screen video, and the multi-purpose screen. Capabilities for New Platforms The Grass Valley MEDIAEDGE is a multi-channel, multi-location delivery system HD or SD video and digital signage applications. It uses standard TCP/IP networks and HD/SD display devices and is comprised of a server, encoder, client software, and SMIL-compliant set-top boxes. The IPTV-based platform also includes new file management and distribution capabilities for the system’s server software, set top box decoders, and live MPEG-4 encoder. The latest version 4.1 of MEDIAEDGE, which the campus will adopt after starting with v3.5, has features like automated error capture and reporting via email, as well as closed caption data decoding in MPEG-2. Due to the successful implementation at the Hawaii campus, sister school BYU-Idaho has also installed a MEDIAEDGE system and others in Salt Lake City and Provo Utah are considering it as well. www.influencemedianetwork.com  |
