Some thoughts on sharing the Public Lecture Series 08 Liverpool

Dear Sarah(sarah.stamper@liv.ac.uk) :

I am a regular attender of the Public Lecture Series offered by our university. I think they are in very good quality in general. Given the limited seats and time, not so many people could attend these lectures. And I see the positive move that your team has made to making these lectures more accessible, namely putting videos online(webcast) from this cultural year!

Here I have one suggestion: making these videos more accessible to all the people around the world, by adopting the best video distributing technologies.

I want to bring your attention to this because the first webcast does not work properly at the moment. The witness link and image are here:

http://www.liv.ac.uk/08/webcast/miller_webcast.html

The video just did not show up. I tried under a windows machine with IE and windoes media palyer perperly installed. I do not know there is exactly the problem, but I see some potential problems:

1. Windoes Media Video format, WMV, is a very closed video format from Microsoft, and it is not as widely adopted in the video market as you thought.
2. The target of WMV audience is too restrictive. This world is not windowes machines only. There are Linux machines, Machintonsh machines all around. The WMA just does not working properly with them, due to the closed approach adopted by Micorsoft.
3. The bandwidth for streaming video is very demanding. I suspect that your current server can handle more than 10 people seeing the videos at the same time.

I think we could do it better:

• Discard WMV, and adopt more open technologies: mp3, flash, and quicktime.

  The most popular ways of showing video or audio over Internet is based on open technologies, as it is accessible to almost any systems: linux, mac, windows, and so on. The best video sharing website Youtube.com is based on flash technology. Here is an exmaple from Yale University’s open courses(there are using a number of open technologies to ensure the delivery of their contents) . Just click the image below to have a look.

• Consider to have a Youtube channel.
  
  I think Youtube is so far the best place to make your videos seen! It provides free service to all, which could be very money costing given the huge amount data that involved.
  Here is an example from a top university in USA: Carnegie Mellon University

  http://www.youtube.com/user/carnegiemellonu

  They use this channel to show very interesting lectures and activities in their university.
  

I hope this will help a bit to make our lectures more accessible to the world, which will build the reputation of our university as a return.

Best wishes,

Ji

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