How Can My Organization Start Doing Streaming Media?

This document is meant to give a high-level idea of how to get started doing streaming media, whether you're a government organization or a private corporation. Since there aren't many government organizations that are currently delivering audio or video across the Internet, we hope that our site will provide insight and inspiration to others in the public sector.

Before you get started, you need to ensure a few things are in place:

1. Get management to buy in to the idea of delivering video on the Web. Depending on your specific situation, there are countless benefits to delivering streaming audio and video. Web site traffic tends to go up considerably when you add video to your site. Audio and video are a much richer format for delivering information. You can use streaming media inside your organization to deliver training material so employees don't need to leave their desks. They can view material as time permits instead of scheduling a training room, an instructor, and time on their calendars. The list of benefits goes on...
2. Determine how the video or audio content will be produced. Most organizations don't have a television studio like the City of Seattle, so you may need to rely on freelance videographers or outside video studios to get your videos produced.
3. Make sure you will be able to update your content regularly. If your content doesn't change regularly, people will get bored with your site and won't come back.
4. Pick a technology and go with it. We chose to use RealNetworks' streaming technology because of the incredible worldwide market penetration of their RealPlayer software. We decided that it was better to pay for the server software (RealServer in our case) and know that the majority of our audience would either already have a copy of the RealPlayer installed or could get a free copy easily.  There are other viable alternatives available such as Windows Media Player & Encoder.
5. Determine how your videos will be hosted. We chose to host them ourselves because we have an adequate Internet connection to do so and trained staff managing Web servers already.  Most organizations have their Web sites hosted at an ISP and this is generally the best option. A growing number of ISPs are providing hosting services, so ask yours for more information. Even if you choose a different ISP than the one that hosts your Web site, you can still have links on your regular Web pages to the videos that are hosted elsewhere.
6. Determine how your videos will be encoded. We handle encoding in-house since we have a television studio with a sophisticated video routing system and staff to do the encoding. We determined that it was worth the expense to purchase 2 video encoding workstations, one dedicated to live streaming and one for archiving videos, based on the convenience and the volume of videos we would be producing. Many organizations would be better served by outsourcing this function to a video encoding service provider or a video service house. If you choose to do encoding yourself, you could do a relatively good job by connecting a VCR (maybe you've got one from home) up to a Pentium II PC (maybe your regular office PC) with a sound card and speakers (most new computers have these) and a video capture card. A good quality video capture card costs approximately $200.

Good Luck !

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