Development Seed Blog

I am Terry Shea, Director of Technology at Berkshire School. I appreciate Eric's comments about our alumni outreach and our webstreaming initiatives. Let me give you a little background on how we got started on this program:

I came to Berkshire in 2001, inheriting a vision ( and some great hardware ) of putting Athletic events online occasionally. My predecessor, started the program by making sure that the campus was completely wired and had sufficient bandwidth to carry a stream out of here and to the outside world via the StreamGenie. The Genie is a rolling Windows server that contains all of the necessary A/V hardware and software components to enable us to connect several cameras and microphones and edit a broadcast on the fly, much like a live TV broadcast. When I arrived, we continued to broadcast events on a very ad hoc basis without much advertising, knowing that only a few people could connect.

What we found is that the demand for these webcasts was very large - alums, parents, prospective students...anyone who had a stake in Berkshire wanted to see this stuff! So we grew...increasing bandwith, experimenting with outsourced providers, testing bitrates...pretty soon we put Berkshire's radio station, WBSL online (mms://69.43.160.125/WBSL) and parents were listening to their kids from Tokyo and Hamburg. You can hear archived perfomances from some of my live musical guests at www.bsn.net/webcasts

Now the best part is that we did this using free software and the tools at hand. The radio station is simply Windows Media Encoder pushing out a signal from a tuner attached to the sound card. During the day, I switch over to another PC running a Winamp playlist of 3,000 songs and commercials I recorded with the students and faculty. We eventually had to create a link just for off-campus listeners as our bandwidth became saturated. We sent a dedicated 96k stream out to a server at Basiclink in San Diego which we pay a small monthly fee to maintain. On-campus listners connect directly to the server with Media Encoder running.

Last year, we decided to push the envelope and see just what we could achieve with our Streamgenie. We had brodcast a couple of hockey games, even using two camera angles and adding some play-by-play and captions. I thought it might be fun to let the parents of the cast of Cabaret ( performed last February ) see the performance from home, since I'm always asked for copies of tapes anyway. My idea was a muiltimedia extravaganza: 2 streamed live performances and a DVD to follow. So, we used the feed from the sound board to capture the wireless mics used in the show and augmented the sound by hanging condenser mics on stage and reinforcing the orchestra with more discrete mics. We set up cameras on house left and right as well as one in the back of the house. This gave us 3 angles to choose from. Starting with dress rehearsals, we brought in our student crew and rehearsed the shots and the angles we would use for broadcast.

For the preshow, we had captured stills from the rehearsals and ran a slide show of performance shots while the 30 minutes of preshow played. We also had captions ready for intermission and we scrolled credits from the program when the show ended. The end result looked and sounded no different than a professional broadcast. The sound was rich stereo with mics panned to true stage left and right. We also captured the sound to a WAV file for later use in the DVD.

The broadcast was a success - parents watched from Jamaica, Germany, Canada and all over the US. We learned this time that we cannot handle the traffic when the demand is large. We outsourced to another provider that time to handle the connection as we put out a 256k burst to them. ( The average person connected at around 221k..sometimes a little lower ). Multicast was simply never going to work, so Unicast it was, and probably always will be unless we can manage a way to figure it out. We took the resultant archive, kept it on the web for later viewing and created a 2 disc DVD with 2 nights of performance, an enhanced soundtrack from the WAV file, commentary tracks from students and Directors and extras (stills, credits, etc.)

This year, we felt confident enough to toot our horn and formalize things. The BerkshireLive! project is a scheduled series of events, both athletic and artistic that we hope to push out to as many people as possible. Each time, we push our limits as to what content we can provide, how many people can connect and how we can serve this traffic. We may have to permanantly outsource the stream at some point, but we'll try not to. This began as a hobby of sorts, a "what can we do with what we have" type of thing. But, we now see the power of webcasting as a tool for marketing, outreach, recruiting and relations with the community. We even have a campus cam running above our sometimes functional weather stats (http://bsn.net/rkmp/mountainweather/index.htm) that is a popular destination for alum and parents who just want to see what it looks like at Berkshire at a given moment. I use it to see if anyone's walking to my office!

So, keep your eye on www.berkshireschool.org / www.bsn.net for the next event. More hockey to follow in January and the entire month of February is filled with webcasts. Eric...we'll see you there!

Terry Shea