There are actually a few schools that are using IPTV as their only distribution method of television to residents. Most of those residents are happy to get it, however, those schools never had television for the residence halls before.  Northwestern is doing this with a non-standards based product called Video Furnace.

 

Other schools are experimenting with IPTV across their network.  Many are sending only sending a few channels across their network.  The only school that has a large offering of IPTV is Wisconsin, who has a few local channels encoded using Quicktime.

 

Our department is investigating sending some data across our network, but we are treading very cautiously.  There are a few great products that we are experimenting with (like some of the encoders that Motorola and EGT are demoing for us right now) that allows for multicast, double pass H.264 encoded streaming.  Our problem is that Multicast isn’t very prevalent in our network at the moment.  We also have to watch some of the bottle-necks at the larger-use cases out there (dorms).  A typical SD stream at full resolution is about 1MB/s using H.264, and a full HD stream is in the upwards of 12MB/s stream per channel.  I have a sample Flash Media Server which is serving three channels that is working over multicast in the Telecom building, and the quality is good.  During our next Cable TV meeting, I will probably be demoing this to the group.

 

One issue that is being brought up by all the players in the Internet2 community is licensing.  Almost every content provider has a provision in their contract that explicitly denies us from providing any IPTV solutions.  In fact, even the Big Ten Network’s contract (which was signed through the Fox Sports Network) disallows us from broadcasting their signal on our data networks.   Most schools that are doing IPTV tests are flying under the radar, and are running against their licensing agreement with their content providers.  Schools that are using products like Video Furnace are OK, as their products have built in DRM (via a dongle that must be plugged into the laptop/pc) that allows Video Furnace to track the usage.  

 

The contract that we are negotiating with Comcast right now won’t allow us to do any large-scale IPTV deployments without additional penalties.  The TOS that we would have to sign to allow us to do IPTV pretty much says that I would have to pay our commercial content rate PER ETHERNET OUTLET (this would be in addition to the 13,000 cable outlets we already pay for).

 

All in all, it is something that we are investigating, however, since we have a very strong offering via our coax network, I don’t know how fast that deployment will happen.   Maybe when the 10gig project is done J

 

-Nick Kwiatkowski

 MSU Telecom Systems

 

 

Nick,

 

This isn’t on topic exactly, but:  I’ve heard that another Big Ten school, which shall remain nameless, is feeding campus TV channels to video-over-IP.  You can connect from anywhere in the world and watch the channels you could get on campus – including Big Ten Network and locally originated channels.  Any thoughts of providing the MSU campus community with such a service?

 

/rich

 

 

NAG List,

 

   This isn’t really a data-networking thing, but I’ll ping the list anyway (since we are all techie’s anyway).   We are in the process of upgrading the campus cable television system, and are currently broadcasting 6 Digital Channels on the campus television network.  We have the Big Ten Network and WKAR in HD, and a few SD channels for people to test the quality, and ease of use of.  

 

   We are broadcasting these channels in a technology called ClearQAM, which is the industry standard for non-encrypted television service.  Many newer televisions have ClearQAM tuners built-in.   Instructions and a survey are located at:

 

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=TaAAnAdXi1mU3EXin40rxQ_3d_3d

 

  We would appreciate your help and opinions in testing this service!  

 

-Nick Kwiatkowski

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Nicholas Kwiatkowski
Communication Systems Analyst
Telecommunication Systems Department, P&E Group
Michigan State University

 

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