RMIT Streams TV Content On Demand to Universities

The new service Informit EduTV results from a collaboration between EnhanceTV and RMIT Publishing as a specialised resource for the tertiary market. Enhance TV is a source of information about upcoming educational programs and copies of broadcasts. Jamie LeHuray, Manager of EnhanceTV, explained the basis of the services.

From VHS to Streaming

“Screenrights licenses schools, TAFEs and universities to copy from television and radio, and to put copied programs on an intranet, email them and manage them. To do this they using a licensed digital system or resource centre, such as Enhance TV and RMIT’s Informit EduTV,” Jamie said.

“Licensed resource centres provide access to programming after broadcast through a database. Since 2002, Enhance TV has also published a TV guide that announces educational programs a week in advance while also acting as a library for after-broadcast sales.”

From 2006, Enhance TV distributed copies of programmes via their website, initially VHS tapes and then DVDs, which are still available. Fees are set for cost-recovery only – sales are non-profit. In 2009, provision via download became available. Of course, these services meant a school could watch only what they had purchased and downloaded, on a discreet system. However, the library actually contains about 13,000 programmes in the archive, some dating back to 2006.

More recently, in an effort to provide better, more customisable access, the material can be streamed through the new streaming service, Enhance TV Direct. It is a cloud provision allowing schools and universities to stream any programmes at any time into the classroom, while teachers and students can watch at home on any device.

Service Sharing

Meanwhile during the same period, RMIT Publishing has been specifically supplying the tertiary sector with similar services, adding specialised versions such as TV News. This offers current affairs programming broken down into short segments and made available to universities via streaming. Up until recently, they also ran a similar service for taping and distributing documentaries on demand.

Further to accessibility, these kinds of providers not only make the programmes accessible but also add functionality by creating searchable databases and making the material available as customised, editable clips instead of entire programmes, if desired. Recognising similarities in their interests, RMIT Publishing and Enhance TV started looking for ways to make their services more efficient by sharing some of the costs of ingest and archiving.

RMIT became interested in developing Enhance TV Direct’s type of service for themselves – that is, replacing DVD despatch, Request TV, with the opportunity to stream full programmes where required and going beyond the TV News model. Consequently, as RMIT Informit EduTV, they have essentially taken on and rebadged the Enhance TV Direct service and archive. In turn, they can offer the advantage of their relationships with tertiary institutions and TAFEs. In this way, RMIT has a ready to use streaming system, and Enhance TV has an extended client base.

Teacher and Student Functionality

The clip extraction and editing functions are simple to use. Because Informit EduTV and Enhance TV are browser based applications no particular hardware or software is required. Users go to the website, log in and can access materials and tools in regular browsers – wherever and on what ever device they are using to access the system. Similar services on the market currently such as Clickview or Functional Solutions require specific hardware which is installed at the school. But this application requires no further investment from a school to provide. They subscribe to the service and access material via the desktop, laptop or mobile device.

A teacher can go home, prepare lessons, add notes and select clips to view to support any lessons. The lesson materials are uploaded to a dedicated area in the cloud storage. When the teacher goes to the classroom the next day and navigate to the lesson area, all of these components will be there, ready to use. Alternatively, lesson plans can be emailed to students working from home or a remote location. Teachers and students have logins and passwords for access to the prepared materials and clips through any browser.

Full multiscreen functionality remains a key area for development. At this time, the iPhone, iPad and most other tablets support viewing, but creating lessons on the iPad is still problematic. Enhance TV and RMIT are aiming to have this working properly by the end of the year, because research show that teachers are as keen users of the iPad as they have become of laptops, for which many schools have developed programs.

“The content files are compressed so that the average download is between 300 and 500MB but quality is similar to ABC’s iView catch-up service – in other words, very good and more than adequate for typical lessons except perhaps for an art history presentation, for example, where you would be looking for fine detail,” said Jamie.

Metadata Management

“After looking at research, RMIT and Enhance TV have recognised that what teachers are looking for is vetted, curated material for the classroom. Consequently, beyond selecting programs for their educational value, a major part of what makes Enhance TV Direct different to the other television content providers is the collection of more comprehensive metadata. Information comes from the broadcasters, the film and TV industry, publicists and from the filmmakers themselves.

“For example, for the children’s science show ‘Scope’, users are informed of the topics in each segment, the dates, the presenter and other teaching oriented details that help the user make faster, informed decisions for lessons. The ingest and digital asset management design is handled by Switch Media in Sydney, who also look after digitisation of material to MPEG-4 for download and metadata integration. Usage analytics are another part of the service.”

Each week, Enhance TV takes in 50,000 to 60,000 individual program records, filtered for educational value, resulting in about 5,000 programmes. Eventually, a list is published as their educational TV guide as a weekly email to schools. Most programmes date from 2009 and later, and about 1,000 titles are included from their earlier archives, some as old as 2006. Also, as the networks re-screen shows, they can be included in the ingest schedule to save time sorting through earlier material.

Spoken Words

Supplying content via streaming has brought coincidental benefits for hearing impaired students and spoken word searches. “Formerly if captioned programmes were required two copies had to be produced, one with captions and one without,” Jamie said. “We didn’t have the capacity to do this for every programme. An advantage of streaming is that the captions exist as a separate XML file, so that viewers choose at the time of viewing to turn them ON or OFF. Flexible captions are also useful for students learning English as a second language and those with varying degrees of hearing loss. Further to viewing, of course, the caption files can be included in your search criteria.  

The volume is increasing, especially since a new multi-channel appears almost every week. While ingest is partially automated, automatically omitting some programmes such as cartoons and sports broadcasts – but otherwise a web editor goes through all incoming records and tags those for inclusion. Jamie said, “It’s a huge job that one person can currently just manage on his own, as we’ve been refining the process since 2000. But it’s getting harder.”
www.informit.com.au