The Streaming Blog

Hi and welcome to the first entry in the Video Streaming Blog @ OSU. I’m Raul Burriel, the streaming media coordinator at Oregon State University. I work in the Academic Technologies division of Information Systems. Specifically, I work in the Media Services branch and my job is to help get your videos – and audio – online for delivery. That encompasses both synchronous (live, real-time) and asynchronous (on-demand) content. If you’ve got a video you want people to watch online, or you want to stream an event live, I’m probably the guy who’s going to help you get that done. And we do that we a pretty advanced suite of tools.

Our top top of asynchronous content delivery is OSU MediaSpace. MediaSpace is our campus media delivery platform. Created by software developer Kaltura, MediaSpace is a cloud based (cloud = hosted on servers on the internet, not on campus) solution which allows a content owner to deliver his media (audio or video) to a select audience. That audience can be one person, a handful of people, or everyone. MediaSpace isn’t a means of archiving and storing your content, but of delivering it for playback, a kind of campus YouTube.

So why not use YouTube? YouTube serves a purpose and oftentimes you may find content that’s been uploaded to MediaSpace also available on YouTube. But because of FERPA regulations, we discourage the posting of academic content – particularly content that shows students or records their voices – on a publicly accessible unrestricted site such as YouTube.

MediaSpace allows for any person at OSU – student, faculty or staff – to log in, upload content, and share it to mobile and desktop platforms alike. All you need is an OSU Network ID (ONID) and you can get started, at no direct cost to you or your department. Furthermore, you can restrict your content based on the ONID of other persons at OSU. That means an instructor can restrict their videos with their students exclusively. And a student can upload a classroom assignment with their instructor without fear of other people seeing it. And MediaSpace also integrates with OSU’s Blackboard. In fact, anything uploaded to MediaSpace can be shared anywhere on the web, including a WordPress blog, a Drupal page, a regular HTML page, or a Facebook page. It’s entirely up to you as to how you want to share your content.

If you’re looking to live stream an event, we can help you with that too. OSU hosts its live content at OSU Live. This is our integrated portal for our featured content. Here you’ll find a selection of our best videos along with our featured live events. Our live events are designed to play back on both mobile and desktop platforms. Furthermore, we include a text chat so online participants can interact and in the event of a Q&A session, they can contribute questions to the speaker.

If you’d like more information about these services, please don’t hesitate to contact me at 541-737-4546.