As a part of the Division's project to install the infrastructure necessary for the reception and reticulation of radio and television services around the Division, some television services will be distributed via the computer network and a digital off-air recording service is being developed.
Live streaming
At least five of the television services will be streamed live around the network as multicast streams. The minimum five services have not been chosen, but should include both terrestrial and satellite digital television services. There are no plans to reticulate analogue television services, or any radio services, live around the IP network.
On demand streaming
In order to make the services more widely available and more flexible, it is proposed to develop a system that allows properly authenticated users within the University or the Canberra Institute of Technology to log onto a website and schedule a recording of any available service, as a digital video or audio stream, recorded to hard disk on a central server. These recordings would then be available to appropriately authenticated users to access on demand via computer.
Stored recording should be accessible for editing to appropriately authenticated users, either locally on the server or on the user’s own machine. Recordings should be in a format that can be edited with common video or audio editing tools on Windows and Macintosh, and recorded onto DVDs for replay in most standard DVD players (with transcoding if required) for video, or CD or portable audio devices for audio.
A draft paper on the proposed digital streaming and recording service to be used to support a call for expressions of interest in developing the services is available for comment from the public_documents site in the Division: http://dcenas.canberra.edu.au/public_documents/tsu/digital/ [available to comedu Divisional staff only: authentication required]. The appendix is a presentation outlining the whole project.
Any comments on the paper should be sent to James Steele, TSU manager, by COB on 23 April 2004.
