Nothin' But Net: Campus Network Helps Provide Video Feeds to WEIU-TV For Panther Athletics
Submitted: Thu, Apr 30, 2009 02:47 PM
Eastern’s campus network makes it possible for staff to do their daily work, faculty to teach classes and students to learn. But now it also makes it possible for television viewers in Illinois to watch Panther basketball and football games. The same network on which the university’s desktop computers, servers and printers operate is now being used to transmit voice and video from Lantz Arena and O’Brien Stadium back to WEIU studios in Buzzard Hall for university athletics television broadcasts. The campus network connection provides greater convenience than the coaxial cable/ microwave truck transmission method used in the past while maintaining picture quality.
“We wanted to come up with a system that would work no matter where we were at on campus, and IP (Internet protocol) is the best way of doing that,” said WEIU-TV broadcast engineer Jerry Rankin. “It gives us a lot more flexibility.”
In years past, the university television station had used a coaxial cable connection between Lantz and O’Brien to its studio in Buzzard. But during construction of the Doudna Fine Arts Center building, that connection was severed. In its place, the station began using its microwave truck to feed its signal from the athletics venues across campus back to its studio.
But microwave transmission requires direct line of sight and is affected by the weather, and WEIU sought a more reliable method for its productions. That’s when it turned to the network, in time for the second football game during Fall Semester 2008, and the results have turned out well.
“To the viewer at home, there’s no difference,” Rankin said. “It’s completely transparent.” And for WEIU, it saves the time and expense of setting up its microwave truck for every broadcast. “With the IP system, all we have to do is plug in the network cable and it’s running. It automatically boots up and the transmission starts. All we had to do was have some network ports wired on both ends.” ITS network engineer Randy Ethridge said that the robustness and bandwidth capacity of the network make applications such as WEIU’s possible. “The fact that the network has a 10-gigabit backbone with 1 gigabit to buildings allows us to leverage the infrastructure this way,” he said. “A high-definition video stream runs about 24 megabits, so we have the capability on our network to run the equivalent of 50 high-def streams to buildings and 500 on the backbone.”