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by Skip Warnick

Listening to a radio station’s Web broadcast. Catching the highlights from yesterday’s game on www.espn.com. Viewing the online trailers for a movie you’re considering attending. What do all of these things have in common? They take advantage of streaming media technologies. Streaming media refers to the process of transmitting compressed audio and video files via the Internet.

A nice toy, but hardly useful in higher education, right? Wrong!! Streaming media can be used in ways limited only by your imagination. Imagine being able to deliver a lecture that references Web sites and having the ability to visit those Web sites and discuss the materials found there while you lecture. Easily done right? Now imagine sitting in one of UM’s teaching theaters and delivering that same lecture, with the same capabilities, to a group of students in China!

How about those all-important mid-term and finals review classes that many students don’t realize the value of until exam time? What if you could give your students the ability to sit down at a computer, at any time they choose, and view the class in its entirety? Or maybe they just missed a class due to illness? None of these scenarios are a problem when you record the lecture and make it available to students on the class Web site.

One of the tools used by our recruiters is the physical appeal of the university. Pictures on a Web site are nice, but they hardly communicate the true grandeur of our campus. How about a Web cam overlooking the Mall, or a professionally produced video that would be available for viewing on the university’s Web site? Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other family friends live all over the world and are much too far away to attend graduation, right? Streaming media technology can allow them to “attend” graduation from their own homes via the Web.

These are but a few examples of what is possible with streaming media. The university has recently upgraded its server software and hardware in anticipation of a boom in the use of streaming media on campus.

How do you get the stream from your camera to the Internet? First you install streaming software (available for free or for purchase) on your computer. The software translates your video stream for the server you intend to use and then either saves the stream to a file, streams it to the server, or both. Then, you should coordinate with OIT to schedule live streaming events, or just capture your stream and save it to a file for on-demand streaming.

To find out what services are being offered, who is eligible, and how to make use of them, visit www.streamingmedia.umd.edu. Examples, information, and recent events are all available for your viewing as well as a bit more technical information for those interested.

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