And We’re Live: What You Need to Know about Live Webcasting and Lecture Capture

Hello, and welcome to our continuing series of live

webinars documenting creative use of

Mediasite around the world.

I'm Sean Brown, and today's webinar is entitled "And We're

Live, What You Need to Know About Live Webcasting and

Lecture Capture."

We have one of the larger audiences that we've ever

assembled with over 500 people

registered for today's webinar.

And once again, we've managed to get representation from

institutions in almost every state in the United States,

every province in Canada, and many institutions in countries

in Europe and Asia and the Middle East and

all around the globe.

So I just want to say a big welcome to you all.

Before I introduce my guest and friend, I have a couple

housekeeping things I want to go over with you.

During the webinar today, if you have any questions, below

the video you'll see a speech bubble.

If you click on that bubble, you'll be presented with a

form where you can type in a question.

Please include your email address as well.

That will help us get back to you if we run out of time.

Any question that is received will be directed through

Mediasite to me here in the studio, and I'll relay it to

our guest. There's also additional information

available under the Links tab, which is towards the right of

that toolbar that you see below the video.

And now to talk about my guest. Brian Smith is the

video operation supervisor for academic technology and

information technology at the University of Florida.

Brian's been working at the University of Florida since

way back in 2000, first as a student, and then

transitioning to full time upon graduating.

So he's a true Gator.

He has a BS in business administration.

And even though he's young, he started live streaming just

like I did back with Real Networks, Real Producer, and

eventually switched to Windows Media, until he saw the light

and became one of our strongest supporters and

expert users and supervisors of the Mediasite

system since 2004.

It is my distinct pleasure to welcome you back to Madison.

Good to see you, Brian.

Thanks, Sean.

It's good to be here.

As Sean said, I've been dealing with streaming media

for roughly 12 years, and finally switching over to

Mediasite and doing most of our streaming media at this

point using Mediasite since 2004.

We're currently supporting about 25 recorders, both

mobile and rack-mounted with our EX server.

We use about two mobile recorders for live events all

over campus, throughout the state even, and have a couple

more installed in studios and non-automated classrooms where

we actually have a camera operator and controller

running the classroom.

But the majority of our recorders are installed in

automated classroom set up to do automated scheduling of

recordings and occasional live classes from classrooms.

Most of the recorders are controlled by my department,

but we do have some that are run by Human Resources,

College of Medicine, the Academic Health Center, and

the College of Veterinary Medicine.

While they manage the recorders, we do provide the

service support for them.

We have over 2,500 unique logins every single month, and

a couple thousand more anonymous users every month.

In 2011, we had over 450,000 presentation views.

That was up about 20% from 2010, and about three times as

much from 2009.

Each month we have about 1,300 different presentations viewed

on our Mediasite server, and that's out of about 4,000

presentations actually stored on the server.

So when you look for the important elements in

selecting a system to go live, when you made that decision

that part of your streaming service should include live

events and a webcasting system so you could go live, what

were the most important factors that you could share

with our audience that allowed you to select a system?

Well, Sean, when we started looking for a live webcasting

solution, we were looking to replace computer encoders

running Real Producer or Windows Media Encoder.

The new system had to be able to go live or just record for

on-demand presentations, and stream at the highest quality

content possible.

The majority of what we were doing at the time were one-off

events in various locations across campus.

Therefore, a highly mobile solution was needed, one that

was flexible and could be used in many different scenarios

and accept a wide variety of inputs, because oftentimes we

didn't know what the situation was going to be depending on

where we showed up.

So it had to be highly flexible.

And whatever you're told in advance, it

might change, right?

It could change five minutes before a presentation.

You know, someone could all of a sudden decide to have audio

in a presentation, and we have to be prepared for that.

However, we knew that eventually an installed

solution was going to be needed to complement the

mobile scenarios we were encountering And it had to be

highly scalable across our campus, of course.

I mean, we have--

50,000?

We have just under 50,000 students on our campus and

over 180 classrooms. So in order to get the most bang for

our buck, it had to be highly scalable, or at least be able

to reach the highest number of students possible.

So a system that could be both mobile and installed, with the

same exact behavior was essential.

When using mobile recorders, we have operators running

every aspect of the recording.

With the installed classrooms, everything needed to be

completely automated, with little to no interaction from

our technical staff.

We wanted it to start and stop on a schedule, with the

instructor only needing to worry about

selecting a camera preset.

Essentially, the most important thing to us was,

aside from being extremely reliable and functioning the

same exact way time in and time out, it had to be highly

flexible and provide the same behavior every time.

So reliable, flexible, and a lot of automation.

These are the factors in going live, especially.

Absolutely.

Yes.

Especially going live, because you can have anywhere from 5

to 1,000 people watching your live presentations.

And it has to work for them right at that moment.

And it's no secret to anybody watching, obviously, as I said

in the introduction, you guys are users of Mediasite, so

hopefully we fit that bill that we're

reliable and flexible.

But you've used everything.

You've used a lot of different systems and you still have to

use a lot of different systems to support streaming.

Correct.

The majority of the recordings we do on campus are with

Mediasite, but we also have Camtasia Relay installed in

classrooms, provide opportunities for instructors

to create their own content and run it off our streaming

media server, and in the past we've tested

many different vendors.

And we've been happy with Mediasite and have been using

it since 2004.

Well, that's great.

Well, we try our best to keep up with you.

And like I said, when people ask you in the conferences we

go to and different things, you come to be recognized as

an institution that doesn't just do on-demand, which is

hard enough in and of itself, but takes that

extra step to go live.

Now along that way, with questions I've collected in

advance, another thing that people ask are, what are the

differences between going live from multiple mobile broadcast

venues like we discussed versus

going live in a classroom?

And do you think it's appropriate to

go live in a classroom?

Absolutely it's appropriate to go live in classrooms. I mean,

if an instructor wants their students to see the material

at that moment and be able to participate in, let's say, an

online discussion forum immediately following a class,

then absolutely they should have the option to go live

from a classroom.

And we provide that opportunity for them.

Each one of our installed classrooms is able to go live.

Totally makes sense.

And when live webcasting from a smart classroom, we can

control nearly every aspect of the installation, from the

network and the in-room audio--

audio is extremely important, because you have to hear your

instructor, obviously--

to the location of the camera and available computer inputs.

Say a presenter wants to use a VJ document camera as opposed

to the podium computer or bring in their own tablet PC,

we have to make those opportunities

available for them.

Totally makes sense.

And everything in those classrooms can be tested

during installations.

And we can trust that it will work exactly the same way

every time.

Totally makes sense.

Now, I'm watching--

you're doing a great job of presenting to the audience.

I'm looking all over the place.

Anybody's who's texting me and saying, pay attention to

Brian, I'm trying to watch your questions coming in, and

then to make sure, because I didn't know if you guys would

do such a good job-- which you are-- of sending me questions,

I've collected questions from folks which are in the

abstract as well.

So I'm going to be bouncing between those.

That's great.

And any time you want to bring up an audience question --

Oh, I have one.

You've got a bunch.

Send them on.

We're willing to answer them.

It's like a press conference.

You might start sweating in a minute.

My friend Tom is from one of the biggest corporate

companies, but he understands education.

My friend Tom asks, what do you think the biggest

challenge is in producing a successful

live streaming event.

And this is a question from a man out there in the audience

who does a lot himself but in a corporate context.

So he's asking, in the higher ed context, what do you think

is the biggest challenge?

For us, it's not always knowing what

the presenter expects.

I think people are nodding all over the world, in many

different languages.

Yes.

The presenter walks in and you have to like--

I have an iPad.

Yes.

Oftentimes we're dealing with a secretary or an instructor

who is bringing in a guest speaker.

Some delegate.

Gotcha.

Some delegate.

And they may have expectations of what the presenter will be

doing, and they pass those along to us.

But they don't necessarily know everything.

They don't know if a presenter's going to have

YouTube videos embedded in their presentation.

They don't know if they're bringing a Mac with a DVI or

VGA output on their computer, or a display port.

Is there the display port adapter?

Yes.

We don't have display port adaptors, so they have to

bring those themselves.

But if they don't, we have to find a work-around for them.

So that's probably the biggest this challenge for us.

So to Tom's question, you say the biggest challenge in

higher ed, which might be the case for him as well, is that

preparation for that variable, unpredictable variable, of

what the presenter is going to actually need when it comes

time to start.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And what's compounded with that is a lot of times we

don't have much time to set up, because we're on a class

schedule in most of our rooms. And we usually don't have more

than an hour to set up.

That goes to a question somebody else asks.

Is the turnaround time for live different than when you

are doing on-demand?

For mobile events, it's typically pretty much the same

every single time, whether it's live or on-demand.

We like an hour set up time in advance, whether we're doing

live or on-demand.

Pretty much the only variable that changes

is the network cable.

Everything else is the same.

We still need the audio.

We still need the output from the computer.

We still need to be able to set up our cameras and ensure

we have proper lighting in the room.

But the only difference with the live is we have to plug in

that network connection and make sure it's working.

That whole variable of the network is critical.

Absolutely.

I hope we're having no issues like that today.

No, we do well every month.

Another question that I want to ask you is, is live

webcasting a self-fulfilling prophecy?

In other words, when you go live does it make people want

more live or has the demand for live kind of been natural?

And the other thing is, people want to know how does social

media relate to going live?

Does the existence of Twitter and all that put more pressure

on you to be live?

Good question.

Ever since we started live webcasting in the early 2000s,

we have seen near exponential growth in the number of

requests every single year.

And your system-- pardon me for interrupting--

at the University of Florida, your service

is an opt-in service?

Absolutely.

So the faculty, if they don't want their class recorded,

they don't have to be recorded.

If they want to be recorded and be

on-demand, they can be on-demand.

So anybody who's going live from a classroom is someone

who's decided, I want to go live.

Correct?

Absolutely.

OK.

Continue.

Sorry.

We have some colleges, like the College of Business, that

do their own streaming.

True.

And they require their classes to be online.

The instructors know that and expect that.

They're going to have online students, because the number

of enrollments just dictates you can't get all this

students into a class.

So they go live every day, from all rooms?

They're not going live, but they are recording every

single one of their lectures.

Got it.

And as more groups on campus become aware of the capability

of doing this, we have many more different groups asking

for our services.

Usually they'd start with an event here, an event there,

just to test it out, or maybe just record their classes for

a semester, just to see what it's going to be like, but not

necessarily distribute them to their students at that point,

or maybe just distribute them to students that were sick and

need to catch up on a class here or there.

But more often than not, we found

ourselves with repeat customers.

They like the product.

They like the ability to get it out to their students,

either live immediately or within 5, 10 minutes of the

end of their class.

It's not a huge delay, even with the on-demand stuff.

And as travel budgets began to get slashed, it became

increasingly important to provide a means of

participating to those interested but unable to

attend a seminar or a conference in person.

So now it's almost expected for most events

to be viewable online.

Got it.

Totally makes sense.

I'm just trying to go through the questions

that are coming in.

Tariq asked a question from Mount Sinai.

He said, I caught that you sometimes show embedded video

in presentations.

Are you saying you can stream PowerPoint presentations with

the webcam functionality for the speaker, and still show

the full motion video slides inside of a presentation?

If that's possible, I'd love to see an example.

So basically, just for everyone, because we'll get an

example to Tariq, but talk about that piece that you

talked about when you didn't know in advance somebody

walking up is going to play a YouTube video, maybe, in the

middle of their presentation, right there embedded in their

PowerPoint.

How's that work?

When we have mobile events and we have an operator behind our

Mediasite, the Mediasite recorder has this great

functionality that enables you to flip the capture from the

computer up to the video window.

And you're able to, where you would normally see your

talking head presenter, you would be seeing the live

motion video from YouTube.

And with that, you also have the option to do

picture-in-picture in that video , so you can still keep

your talking head in that video and be able to watch

your YouTube video at the same time.

Totally makes sense.

And that's a great functionality.

The last minute issue we would have with something like that

is if we weren't set up to capture the

audio from a computer.

And that's one of those things that we need to be aware of in

a timely fashion so we can make sure we

can capture the audio.

Mediasite makes capturing the video easy, because we're

already taking the computer output.

It's the audio that's the extra step that we have to be

prepared for.

Totally makes sense.

Another question is, is instructor involvement and

resulting faculty feedback different for live versus

on-demand streaming?

It can be to an extent, but we treat every webcast the same,

whether it's live or on-demand.

From a producing standpoint, everything is the same for us,

except that network, as we discussed.

Fair enough.

Audio, video, presentation, they're all equally important

to a live webcast or an on-demand webcast. The only

thing missing, like we said, is the network connection.

For the instructor, we haven't tried to

change their behavior.

We want them to teach the students that are in the

classroom, be aware of the online audience, but we

haven't tried to change their behavior any.

We haven't really begun to utilize Mediasite's great

interactive features.

the polling, the question and answer moderation, as Sean is

so excellently handling right now.

With our live webcasts, students still have the

opportunity to attend live classroom sessions and

interact with the instructor there in person if they want

to do that.

Or they can use our e-learning environment,

Sakai, to pose questions.

So Sakai is your LMS.

It's our LMS.

Some people use Blackboard.

You use Sakai.

Exactly.

We are doing Sakai at this moment at University of

Florida, yes.

Cool.

So they can engage in online discussions using Sakai.

So we don't necessarily see the need to use the question

and answer function within Mediasite at this point.

Gotcha.

Because it can be embedded right next to it.

Correct.

Because there's a lot of questions about how you use it

with an LMS.

I have an example here I can show.

Sure.

OK.

And without a moderator in class, during automated

recordings, it's just difficult for the instructor

to keep track of all the online questions, while also

paying attention to the students

that are in the classroom.

Fair enough.

Because oftentimes our classrooms can have 250-pluse

students in them.

And it's rather difficult to focus on 250 students in front

of you and 250 people watching online.

Unbelievable.

And for the non-course course events, with our technical

staff on-site, we can provide the opportunity for those

interactive features.

Oftentimes in these cases, there is someone from the

group presenting that has someone available to moderate

questions online.

So we give them that ability to ask questions.

Love it.

And one of our professors actually said, our students,

they're not off campus.

They have the option of attending the live lectures

and monitoring email during a 50 minute class

period will be difficult.

So that's one of the thoughts from our own faculty, is just

we're adding extra complication

that they don't need.

So here's an example.

It's just very simple.

Using the Mediasite catalog, we just embed it into Sakai.

We just give the instructor a weblink to their catalog, and

they can easily just put that in--

So a student goes to the same place they've always gone.

They go to Sakai.

They go to their course area.

And now they see a catalog, a list of recorded presentations

or things that are about to go live versus just static pages.

It will show up right here, right here in this catalog.

And it's automatically updated as soon as that lecture's

uploaded after class, and that's usually within five

minutes of the end of class.

Now there's a bunch of people who just exploded right when

you said Camtasia Relay.

And they want to know--

I'm just consolidating three or four different questions

from different people, but they want to know how you use

Camtasia Relay.

Do you publish it into the LMS?

Do you use the built in Sonic Foundry Mediasite EX

integration?

Are you looking at that?

How do you use Camtasia Relay at the University of Florida?

Great question.

Before Mediasite introduced their media import job, we

were using Camtasia Relay and just simply either

distributing videos to a regular FTP account on a

streaming server, and the instructor had to individually

post their links to their LMS, or we give them the

opportunity to export their Camtasia Relay automatically

to

iTunes U. Got it.

Oh, that was-- great.

I'm glad you said that, because one of the people

said, do you publish your Camtasia to iTunes U?

Yes..

At the University of Florida, we do have a partnership with

iTunes U, and any instructor is able to create an iTunes U

class page.

Gotcha.

But since August, we implemented the Mediasite

import jobs, and we've transitioned any new request,

that if they want to record their class that semester in

Camtasia Relay--

You send it to EX and then it can make it to Sakai the same

way it does--

We just create a Media import job and associate a catalog,

and again, just like up on the screen right now, we give them

a catalog link to embed into Sakai, and as soon as their

Camtasia Relay processes their video--

Well, that's what we need them do.

--Mediasite imports it.

I'm glad you said that.

It shows up there.

We try to simplify it.

So basically, if I'm an instructor and I choose to

create my own content on my desk with Camtasia, I still

can send it through Mediasite, same workflow, easy for you.

If I'm an instructor and I want to use a smart classroom

that's automated, I can do that either on-demand or live.

And if I'm doing a mobile event use your mobile cart

recorder R2-D2 thing that you built on campus that more

people ask me about--

what kind of wheels did you use on this cart?

I'm serious.

Serious.

When you talk about this out there, people need to know.

Absolutely.

But basically, no matter how it's captured, you can flow it

through EX server, through security, right into Sakai.

Plumbed once, used many different ways.

Absolutely.

As soon as we get in a request from the instructor to use

Camtasia Relay, we can have that import job and catalog

out to them within a day.

By the end of the business day, oftentimes, but at least

the next business day.

And it's ready for them.

Right on time a gentleman named Dave asked, sounds like

you're very mobile.

I'd like to know the exact equipment list

you used to go mobile.

Let's go look at that cart, then.

We have a pair of these mobile carts that we've set up.

We're currently with the old form factor of the Mediasite

Mobile, but we're--

So you put a Mediasite Mobile Recorder on top of a classic

rack crate.

It's a Gator Case.

A Gator Case.

Appropriately, for the University of Florida, we use

Gator Cases.

Go Tim Tebow.

Right.

Exactly.

And with stout wheels, the kind of wheels that you can

roll on concrete.

We roll this all over campus.

And then you have your mixer and a backup.

Yes.

You keep a broadcast 3/4 inch tape?

That's a DV cam.

DV cams. Gotcha.

What's that for?

We like to have a backup recording of anything, because

if, out of the ordinary, that Mediasite encounters a problem

and the recording stops, we can keep rolling with the tape

and recreate the Mediasite

presentation after the recording.

So you do tape backup.

So if you're going out to do a large event live, you also run

tape backup.

We run a tape backup of every single mobile event we do.

Just in case power or anything else like that.

Yes.

We have an in-line Behringer mixer with additional outputs

on the back of the little patch panel on

the back of the cart.

We have a Sennheiser wireless microphone that we can use a

lavalier or handheld mike with that's always plugged into the

cart, ready to go, because most of the events we do, it's

just one presenter needing a microphone.

So it's ready, on the cart, no additional set up needed.

So basically we roll this cart in, plug in all the cables,

hand them a microphone, and we're ready to go.

Nice.

Now that goes to a bunch of questions that people have

had, and one of the questions I had in advance, which was,

who manages this infrastructure, training, and

support for live webcasting?

Is this all your one department or is it

decentralized?

And how many people?

People want to know how much headcount you use to support

the scale of recording that you're doing on campus that

you described.

For the recording, setting up of automated classes, going to

events, setting up the cart, running cameras, all that we

do within Video Services, my department.

And we have a staff of about four full-time people and six

students doing all that work.

Four full-time people, six students.

All those rooms, 25 classrooms. And two mobile

event services going all over the state.

That's it.

And fortunately we have help with the classroom equipment.

We have a classroom support group, that is on call

whenever there's a class in session, that an instructor

can just call up and they will come out and make sure the

computer and the podium's working, make

sure all this is connected.

And they help to actually install the Mediasites in the

classrooms.

Jonathan asked a question that might relate to that.

Jonathan said, how do you handle multiple videos

sources, like a PC and an Elmo visual presenter and the

teacher video all at the same time?

So would that be a place where classroom support--

describe that for Jonathan.

Classroom Support does the installations for our

classrooms, all 180-some-odd classrooms we have. And in

those classrooms they can have varying equipment.

So there's source-switching capability whether Mediasite's

there or not, designed and supported by this group.

Exactly.

Exactly Whether the Mediasite's there or not, that

equipment is in there.

And the way they handle the switching between VGA sources

is they just have a auto-detect

VGA VA in their podium.

And so they just split the signal that would go to the

projector and give to the Mediasite.

So the answer to Jonathan, basically, I'm hearing from

you is, the Mediasite depends on the same switching among

sources as the projectors.

Whatever an instructor sees on the projector is the same

exact output we're taking to the Mediasite.

Fair enough.

So that's how you do it.

So if they're projecting the Elmo, the Mediasite

captures the Elmo.

If you have your own laptop, if you have a tablet PC, if

you've managed to hook you iPad up to a VGA connection,

you can have that too.

Got it.

And then back to the infrastructure question.

Other people have asked-- and you have a picture of an ideal

data center, but people ask, what

about cloud-based services?

Did you ever think about like, we at Sonic

Foundry could host you.

Did you ever think about or could it technically be if

somebody made a different choice to have this stuff as a

cloud-based service?

We've examined Mediasite hosting and other options, but

basically what it came down to was money.

We felt it was more cost-effective for the number

of presentations we were doing, how accessible we

wanted it, the management we wanted, it was just easier for

us to do it all in house.

But it was a choice?

It was a choice we made.

It's technically possible to go either way.

Absolutely.

Like I would say, you want it in a cup, or you want it in a

cone, like ice cream.

Do you want it on-site, or do you want it off-premise?

And different economics drive different decisions about

on-premises or off-premises.

Yes.

We had discussions with Sonic Foundry about all that, and we

just made the conscious decision to

do it all in house.

Gotcha.

I guess there's a couple questions that I can answer,

just jumping in.

People asked, does Mediasite integrate with other CMSes?

Victor asked, does Mediasite integrate with other

courseware management systems besides Sakai, like they use

at University of Florida, like Moodle and Blackboard?

And the answer is yes.

The way that Brian showed you that they use Mediasite by

embedding a link to a catalog works with any LMS that

supports external weblinks, which is all of them.

So yes, we've got examples of people using Mediasite with

everything.

And another question that somebody had was really nice.

They said, where are you recording now?

They said, what city, and are you in someone's studio?

And Brian is the first guest, I'm so happy to have, in our

new studio here at Sonic Foundry.

We've upgraded our studio, so hopefully we look good.

Yes.

They managed to get this Florida boy up here into the

Wisconsin winter.

Exactly.

You wanted to see the brave new studio as well.

So anything else you had to add about

infrastructure or anything?

We also have a couple other groups helping us out.

We have a workstation support group that helps to manage our

virtual machines that we're going to be transitioning to

when we upgrade to Mediasite 6, hopefully by the end of

this semester.

And we also, of course, Network Services on campus

manages the actual network for the entire campus, so we rely

on them a great deal to make sure we can get our live

events going, no matter where we are.

Now you mentioned iTunes U, so a couple questions blossomed.

I'm going to combine them.

One question is, have you ever used Sonic Foundry's RSS feed

ability to integrate Mediasite with iTunes U?

No.

OK.

I haven't yet.

We've mess around with putting the RSS feed into Sakai, but

we felt the layout of the catalog is so

much nicer for that.

We've played with the RSS feed, but we haven't actually

used it anywhere.

Got it.

And the other question about iTunes U is, even though you

use it separate from Mediasite, do you have to

cooperate with Apple in advance, sign an agreement

with them to be able to use iTunes U?

I believe so.

I wasn't involved with setting up that partnership, so I

can't exactly speak to the details of what it took to get

that going, but I do believe that you do need to make an

arrangement with Apple to get that going.

Fair enough.

Another question that a couple people have asked is delay.

So they've noticed that in live, there's by definition

one person calls it a lag time,

another calls it buffering.

But basically, back to putting on your live hat, is there any

problems with Q&A delay, anything like that that you've

noticed with live lag time?

You're welcome to describe it to the audience.

Yes.

A good example is our faculty senate meetings.

The faculty meets once a month if they're

on the faculty senate.

And you record that and stream it live?

We go live with that every single month.

And oftentimes there are off-site senators, because

we're a land grant university, so we have locations in every

single county in the state.

So it's just not feasible for faculty members to drive in

from Jacksonville or Miami to come in to Gainesville.

So they're able to participate in faculty senate meetings

live online, and watch the webcast.

However, it's important for them to be able to vote on the

issues that are raised during that real time.

Real time.

Got it.

Real time.

This is real-time voting.

So in the beginning when we were trying to figure all this

out, we had to, especially for crucial, close votes, we had

to wait for the responses to come in.

We used Mediasite's question and answer function so that we

can get their name, login, and yes or no on each--

So just like the people are asking questions now.

Exactly the same way.

You say, all right.

It's time to vote on motion XYZ.

And how long do you wait?

We usually recommend at Sonic Foundry that the worst case

scenarios you're going to see in lag is probably like right

now, Brian and I are broadcasting to you at about

25 seconds in your future, on average.

Do you find that to be the case?

Yes.

That's about the lag we get.

And of course, it takes additional time for them to

type in the answer or vote.

So we have to give them a couple minutes.

And by that point, they could have actually moved on to

something else live.

So we have to make sure that they understand they might

need to take a timeout if it's a close vote, and wait for

these votes to come in, because at that point every

vote counts.

So just like right now we're going live, and people are

asking questions.

If we wanted to make sure we got everyone's question, like

right now, everybody that asked a question, we probably

make sure we stopped for like a minute to make sure everyone

had a chance to respond.

And that covers almost any delay.

Yes.

If you're using the online features and you want to use

them, the responses, the poll, the polling results, live in

your class, you need to give it a couple minutes to give a

chance for the online viewers to [UNINTELLIGIBLE].

But if somebody's teaching naturally, do you think that

they can just teach and watch the questions as they come in,

the delay's not really a factor.

I think you have to become accustomed to it.

It's not something that you pick up immediately, because

you're trained to focus on the students in front of you.

So giving yourself a built-in delay in reading the questions

on the fly might not be completely natural.

Gotcha.

We've got a couple of people who wanted to know if you'll

give them advice directly offline about going mobile.

Absolutely.

All right.

We'll throw my email address up there, and you're welcome

to contact me with any questions

you have. All right.

So I'm going to ask you a question from Ozzie.

He said, who, where, and what is the best way to get the

live or pre-recorded feed going?

Who, where?

And so what I think Ozzie's getting at is,

what type of personnel?

Is it a broadcast-type guy?

Is it an IT-type person?

Should it be Network Services that's responsible for this?

Or should it be application specialists, like I know

Mediasite and that's my system for going live, and that's

what the expertise should be driving it.

I think it's the later there, because my background was

business administration.

I hire students from College of Nursing,

telecommunications, criminology.

They don't necessarily have any training

when they come in.

So it's all a matter of someone who knows the

technology or can learn the technology.

Obviously, experience plays a huge role in that.

It helps to have an A/V background if you're designing

a mobile cart.

You have to know how all the signals work together and how

to get them into your Mediasite.

But it comes down to who can learn the technology and get

it to work.

I mean, in my opinion, Mediasite's a great--

I don't want to degrade it by saying simple device, but it's

easy to use.

We set

out for simple Yes.

It's easy to use, and it doesn't take too much

knowledge to get your first recording done.

We consider that a compliment.

What we've tried to do, if I may, to his question is, we

try to make it so that the best person to run the event

is the person who's learned how to use Mediasite so that

the person understands the application, so that Brian can

hire application specialists from all walks of life, teach

them Mediasite, and then underneath, Mediasite's

handling all the ugly networking details and

everything else that have been worked out in advance,

permanently, with the different specialists.

So at installation you'll be working

with networking services.

You'll be working with A/V services.

All that to get it set up--

You'll be working with the experts.

You'll be working with the experts, but once it's

enshrined and settled down, it's underneath the

application.

Thank you.

That's what we're going for.

Yes.

OK.

Good.

Well, if you say we did it, then we were successful.

Oh, absolutely.

You succeeded.

Then we were successful.

Now a couple of people have asked this question, closed

captioning.

I'm going to say it how Jonathan said it.

Do you use closed captioning in your recordings?

If so, how difficult is it, and how often do you do it?

And I'll take another person's question, if you don't, are

you afraid of legal trouble?

If someone asks for captioning, we have to make

every effort.

So it's opt-in again.

Yes.

Again, it's opt-in.

It's available and you have to have it available by law.

You have to have it available.

You don't have to do it every time in University of

Florida's interpretation.

In fact, we don't handle any captioning in-house, and we

have yet to do any live events where we were in charge of

captioning.

However, there is a scenario with our larger commencement

ceremonies, which are held in the basketball arena, and draw

our largest audiences also, they provide captioning online

on the screens inside the basketball arena.

So the video truck has a captionist. We take their

video feeds from them for those events.

And a picture I had up earlier is from one of these

commencement ceremonies.

We're set up in the video truck, and you can actually

kind of see the blue bar and the video window on the

Mediasite recorder.

There it is.

They're doing the live captioning for us.

And that's there for every large commencement

[UNINTELLIGIBLE].

So it's just in the video signal, for those

of you can't see.

It's just in the video signal.

Because Sonic Foundry, we can help you with on-demand

captioning, but we don't do live captioning right now

unless it's in the video.

We do actually do a lot of on-demand captioning.

Gotcha.

We've tested doing it in-house.

We actually have a captioning department where we can--

separate from us, we do have a captioning department that we

can have them put the captions into classes.

Or we've also tested out 3Play Media.

With Mediasite, you can automatically upload your

presentation to 3Play Media, and they will turn around and

give you the captioning transcription and

automatically have it in your Mediasite presentations.

With that partnership, it's a completely automated

captioning process.

Perfect answer.

Some questions, how can reporting of both live and

on-demand views justify the cost of not just webcasting

but the entire course of events.

Different people have asked this question different ways

coming in here.

This is a key question.

But basically, can analytics of live drive how

much people like it?

Can it drive cost justification?

Does it work against you?

Everyone wants to know about this.

Absolutely.

If every single event that someone does only has five

live viewers, they're probably less likely to continue going

live in the future.

If they have a hundred viewers their first time out, they

might fall in love with it.

Exactly.

And based on the responses they get from their viewers,

they'll continue to use it more in the future, and

continue to pay for the service.

But justifying the cost of anything is essential,

especially in the days of tightening budgets.

And our campus is no exception to that.

Like I said before, three times as many people watched

our webcasts last year than they did in 2009.

And obviously the reports showing that happening and

continue to show that growth, it's important for us to

continue to do what we do.

Got it.

And when we can show an event organizer that they had nearly

as many people watching a webcast as they actually had

in the room itself, it's going to have a major impact on them

being able to obtain the funds to continue to provide that to

their customers, their users, their audience.

A friend of mine, Peter-- and he's from a different

industry-- we've got a lot of people like Tom, who's from an

aerospace company.

Peter is from a training company in

the automotive sector.

But Peter says, do you have any suggestions--

I think he picked up on your business background-- about

how to persuade top management when you train automotive

diagnosis in an environment where you don't

charge for the training?

Do you have any ideas, like after flashing this up, about

where people who are stakeholders, who know there

might not necessarily be incremental tuition dollars or

anything else, still felt that it was good ROI?

Well, I mean, probably one of the best things about as far

as training is concerned is you only have to do your

training once if you're recording it with Mediasite.

You'll have it available to have the people obtaining

training watch it many times over and over again, as often

as they need until they absorb the material.

And you're going to have a set of costs related to Mediasite,

getting up and running.

But after you have it ready to record, your cost will pretty

much, aside from hosting, diminish at that point if

you're setting up in a training environment.

And if I may add for my friend Peter, what we find is even

when you're not charging for training, just like Brian

alluded to, travel.

It's the costs that get cut, like, oh, we were able to

train 600 people without them flying in, driving in, coming

over, or somebody going to them.

That, throughout all sectors, including higher education,

business, government, associations, has been one of

the major drivers over the last decade of investing in

Mediasite in times that have not honestly been the greatest

of economic times in the sectors that we have

done so well at.

So our growth has been by people investing who

ultimately do want to see costs cut.

And that's one thing I wanted to say.

Another technical question's come up like a bunch of times,

like popcorn.

Very straightforward question.

Do you use multicasting on campus or not?

Multicasting.

What do you think about?

Honestly, I'm not too much of an expert on that.

We can use it, and we do use it.

But we use what works, and we've been streaming in the

same way since 2002, whether Real Producer, Windows Media,

or Mediasite.

We haven't changed the way we're webcasting.

And in our technical support of University of Florida,

they're typical of many other institutions, which is that

both their live and their on-demand are all unicast

streams. They rarely set up a multicast instance, even

though they have a multicast-capable network.

If they do, it's the exception for large events, like

convocation or different things like that that happen.

That's not true in corporate environments, for my friends

who are joining us from other verticals.

That multicasting is still out there still being used, but

with the advent of different technologies like what we're

using today, smooth streaming and other ways, there's just

more ways, with increasing bandwidth on networks becoming

less congested, plus the many other different tools for

providing the right bandwidth, bit rate, caching, different

things, that while multicast is critical in the situations

where it's critical, it's not necessary in most of the

situations where people want to go live, especially in

higher education.

I think that's true enough or fair enough to say.

Great answer

At least in our experience.

Classroom lighting.

I'm just trying to gather, because we're

almost out of time.

There's three or four different questions about

lighting, including one person that said, our lighting looks

good today.

So I guess we look good.

You look good.

They've done a great job setting up the studio.

Do you have to have specialized lighting in the

examples that you've shown?

In our classrooms, that we have [? our main ?]

Mediasites, no.

We did nothing special with the lighting.

Just straight, the natural lighting that was there.

The lighting is there.

And if the instructor happens to turn off the lights, the

lights go dark on Mediasite too.

OK.

But you said--

my friend Robert says, hey, you said getting good lighting

in regular classrooms. So how do you define

getting good lighting?

Like what's the bad scenario that you have to rectify when

it's just so bad?

The bad scenario is if an instructor believes that they

need the lights off for the presentation on the projector

screen to be seen.

And if they turn those lights off, it's

going to be bad lighting.

Good lighting is just part of the training you have to give

your instructors, especially in an automated scenario.

Leave on most of the lights.

I mean, that's the way the camera is going to be

able to pick up.

Got it.

Or if you can, put a spotlight on the podium if they're going

to be staying at the podium.

But we haven't necessarily done that in any of our

classrooms.

The last question I'm going to take is a very important

question that is asked from another viewer in Texas.

He said, do you ask students for permission to include them

in the recording?

Are the recordings available after the semester is over?

Do you have any experience scaling the system beyond the

number of rooms that you talked about today?

All right.

All good questions.

OK.

First, with this scaling, we have the handful of automated

classrooms, about 10 or 12, and the rest of our classrooms

all have Camtasia Relay.

So at this point, we've used, for

scalability, Camtasia Relay.

What was the first two questions there?

Privacy.

That's what I was saying was so important--

The students.

--that these people wanted to know.

We do not ask permission from our students to have the back

of their heads captured on--

But it's the back of their heads.

It's the back of their heads.

And we don't mike up the audience, so audience

questions, their voices are not heard.

If the question needs to be heard on the webcast, the

instructor needs to repeat the question.

And that's what we found to be the case around the nation,

generally speaking, on that important issue, which is

generally--

I'm not a lawyer.

Sonic Foundry is not saying that.

But institutions generally, when they aren't miking the

students' voices and they're not doing angles that show

their faces, have not worried about releases

and the Privacy Act.

I'm not saying that's wise or not wise.

But those who do do clear that with their legal counsel for

sure, and say, if we're going to have the students miked and

asking questions, we have to have some way of making sure

that they've blanket released their ability to do that and

things like that.

So there's way more questions.

And I know you've agreed to help us answer some

[UNINTELLIGIBLE].

That's why I've thrown my contact information out there

for you right now.

People want to know personal things like, how much does it

cost, and what did you spend in your budget, things that

you may or may not share with them, but we'll direct the

questions to you.

And there were a whole heck of a lot of questions that were

like basically, go Gators, go Gators, go Gators.

Go Gators.

So I knew you'd need to do that for this to be complete.

I'd like to thank you so much, Brian, for coming all the way

to Madison--

Thank you, Sean.

--and doing a fantastic job.

No problem.

I had a great time.

I'd like to thank Event Services for producing another

great webcast in our new studio.

And I'd like to thank all of you, most of all, for joining

us once again.

We'll see you the next time.