Globalizing Community Outreach with Streaming Media

When a new Portland, Oregon-based radio station sought experts in the field of education to interview for a new series of programs exploring strategies to help students be successful in school, the faculty of the College of Education at the University of Oregon was considered an obvious choice. The faculty of our nationally-ranked college represent over 30 years of research expertise. Their research has been the subject of National Education Association documentaries and articles in Education Week.

From the college’s perspective, this community outreach opportunity provided an excellent platform to inform education professionals, alumni, potential students, parents and the general public about our research and outreach activities ranging from dealing with destructive behavior to improving early reading performance. But Oregon is a very large, rural state with 248 school districts scattered over almost 100,000 square miles. Furthermore, the discussions could be of interest to educators in other states and countries. Although Portland is the largest city in Oregon, the radio station’s broadcast range was less than 75 miles from the metropolitan area. So, we explored the use of streaming media to extend the programs to a global audience.

Streaming is a relatively new method of delivering multimedia content over a network. Unlike linking to a standard audio or video file which requires the browser to download the entire file before it can be loaded into the appropriate player and played, streaming uses both client and server software working together to transmit and receive data simultaneously to produce uninterrupted sound or video. The client side buffers a few seconds of multimedia data before it starts sending it to the speakers, which compensates for momentary delays in packet delivery. This makes it possible for the listener/viewer to begin listening/viewing the content after only a few seconds (broadband) to a few minutes (modem speeds) after the file begins to download.

There are a number of different streaming formats available. The most familiar are Real Player (http://www.realaudio.com/), Quicktime (http://www.apple.com/quicktime/), and Windows Media Player (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/EN/default.asp). As we began to consider our options to provide streaming content, KPAM AM860 (http://www.radiofreeoregon.com ), the station involved in the project, explained that they currently stream their broadcasts through a service offered by StreamAudio (http://www.streamaudio.com/). A growing list of internet service providers (ISPs) offer radio broadcast streaming (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/en/service_provider/service/default.asp#Radio). However, unlike many ISPs, StreamAudio provides the service at no charge to the radio station because their software incorporates clickable advertising to generate revenue from streaming activity. StreamAudio provides a 450 Mhz Pentium class encoding computer to the radio station that is connected to the radio station’s broadcast console. The encoding software developed by StreamAudio incorporates Microsoft’s Windows Media Player technology to create an active streaming format (.asf) file. The file is then transmitted to Stream Audio’s high capacity streaming servers and linked to the radio station’s web page. The file encoding and serving processes occur in real time so listeners can actually call in with questions during the course of streamed programs. This appeared to be ideal for our purposes. StreamAudio even graciously agreed to serve archive files of the interviews for us following the broadcasts at no charge. The radio station also generously agreed to provide us with tapes of the interviews and permission to copy and redistribute the tapes for the cost of materials and handling and copies of the streaming files on CD. Every base seemed to be covered.

To promote the upcoming event, I created a web page to explain how to prepare to view the broadcasts by installing the appropriate Media Player for a client’s particular computer system (http://interact.uoregon.edu/broadcastprep.html). I created a web page with pictures of the faculty members and links to articles related to their discussion topics that would be updated each week with a link to an archive file of the interview (http://interact.uoregon.edu/coeonline.html). Then I prepared successive home page modifications to feature a teaser about the upcoming interviews to generate interest from students, faculty, staff and other visitors to our website. Sample:

The university public relations office released a Portland-area announcement about the upcoming broadcasts and a statewide news item. Brochures were mailed to alumni and school districts around the state.

I have learned over the years to be a little skeptical of technology vendors’ claims, so before the broadcast date, I installed Media Player on a number of different platforms to test streaming performance in different environments. Unfortunately, as I had feared, problems began to crop up. The first problem we encountered was a file naming convention problem that caused playback of the broadcast file to fail on MacIntosh clients. Stream Audio's technical support recognized the problem right away when I reported it and modified the file name and resolved this problem.

The next problem we encountered after the interview series, “Kids and Schools – What Works!”, began to air and the radio station began creating the archive files was the inability for Macs, Win95, and Windows NT stations running Media Player 6.x (Media Player 7 was not yet available for these operating systems) to play the archive files. I contacted StreamAudio who agreed to try to find a solution to the problem. They admitted they were new to the technology themselves and had little experience with MacIntosh clients. In my efforts to assist them with troubleshooting this problem, I delved into the extensive Microsoft Knowledgebase on Media Player development. I found references to the need to create a text metafile for each media file and refer to this metafile in the web page link instead of linking directly to the media file. Microsoft’s Knowledgebase explained that when linking directly to streaming files using a standard <a href> tag, the browser simply downloads it like any other document, which defeats the purpose of streaming. With a metafile however, Windows Media Player opens the metafile and interprets the scripting, then uses the URL to locate the content and stream the content. A sample metafile looks like this (where path is the path to the media file):

I noticed that the radio station link referred directly to the media file so I thought this might solve the problem. I created a simple .asx metafile and replaced my link reference. But Media Player would then report that the file was corrupt. I conferred with StreamAudio’s technical support and was told that StreamAudio combines streams of Flash content and javascript into their file during the file creation process to generate the clickable advertising and collect listener demographic data. They speculated that perhaps this material modified the file header enough that the file appeared to be corrupted when opened directly in Media Player instead of through the StreamAudio proprietary client interface which automatically launches when accessed by a Media Player 7 client. Of course, at the time, Media Player 7 was not available for Macs, Windows 95 or NT 4 operating systems, a particular problem for an education environment with large numbers of these clients.

We also tested their file remotely on slow modem lines. We found we encountered severe choppiness of the file streaming at slower modem speeds (<56k). Unfortunately, this problem could also not be resolved by StreamAudio. The software they had developed for producing the archive files apparently encoded the file at a transmission rate that was too high for low bandwidth connections.

Fortunately, I had asked KPAM to produce conventional audio tapes of the interviews. My colleague Terry Kneen, Instructional Systems Coordinator for the college, digitized the audio and created small, compressed streaming files with Quicktime 4 and a digital media utility named Media Cleaner (http://www.mediacleaner.com/) that could be streamed at speeds as slow as 26,400 baud. He installed a version 3 beta Quicktime Streaming Server running the OS X operating system to deliver the files.

We are now in the process of replacing the links to the StreamAudio archive files with these compressed Quicktime files. (See: http://interact.uoregon.edu/destructive.html). These files are playable by both PCs and Macs and can be streamed without a pause on slow modems.

I recommend publication with some minor modifications and additions. This is an excellent article providing what I feel most readers will find new information about a new technology with extraordinary potential. The web pages created at Oregon to support the series are very good models.

The article really is two articles in one. The first describes the technology itself, the series, and the decision-making that went into preparing the series. The second describes the author's adventures in troubleshooting the technologies to make the webcasts work. This doesn't particularly bother me, but structurally it would be helpful for the article to have headings that visually differentiate its parts.

The article has a little too much first person to suit me. I suggest the article be edited to reflect what was done instead of what the author did.

The page at Oregon that describes the series lists five programs in October and November, yet the author reports results only in vague terms in the next-to-last sentence. The article cries out for some kind of closure that summarizes listener response and any impact the series might have had. How many hits did the series get? Anything about the hit pattern that indicates the hottest topics? Did UO get any feedback from listeners? Was UO satisfied enough to schedule a spring series, e.g., was it worth the effort? If the series didn’t get a lot of response (which I suspect or the author would have reported it), what does the author feel needs to happen to increase the impact in the future?

Is the "30 years of research" in the first paragraph a typo? Is it 300 years of research? An average of 30 years of research? If the entire faculty in the College of Education has only 30 years of research, which is the way this reads, it isn't very impressive for an R-1 university.