This morning I got a call from a tech person interested in video streaming. He wanted to setup his own server. My first question was “are you crazy?” Google Video, YouTube and a dozen other places will not only stream your video using band width that you don’t have to pay for, they will also store all those videos for you. On top of that, these services have slick interfaces that will let anyone easily upload almost any format of video. Arguably, the most difficult steps (from a user perspective) are getting the video into an acceptable format, uploading it and getting it to “play” in an embedded window on a web page. All of these things are super-simple if you use YouTube or one of the similar free services.
The user end is only a small piece of the puzzle from the administrative end. Putting a video server into a school’s network is expensive. The server will require a lot of horsepower and disk space. Depending on the format, video can be a few hundred kilobytes per minute to a few megabytes per minute. In a building with a couple hundred students, each creating a ten minute presentation… the storage alone can get out of hand fast. I have several presentations on Google Video that are almost an hour each.
Once all this video is stored on the server, it has to be streamed. This is where things get completely out of hand. Most schools don’t have the bandwidth required to continuously stream video to a significant number of users. The free services do a great job of minimizing the effect on a network by compressing the video to a reasonable size while maintaining an acceptable presentation quality.
For most schools, using a public streaming service is not even an option. All of them are filtered out. It’s unfortunately that a few users of these public streaming services have ruined it for all of us. Most of the streaming services have policies that prohibit objectionable video uploads, but things do slip by just like they do with every filtering system in every public school.