Video Hosting and Delivery for the University of Cambridge

In 2005 I initiated discourse about video hosting and video delivery at the University of Cambridge. This had come out of the observation that many research groups were purchasing their own video/audio servers, that were operational for limited periods of time, with all content disappearing at the end of that particular project (or when the responsible academic left). Furthermore, the way video was hosted wasn't necessarily standards-based, and thus the University as a whole wasn't presenting video to the general public in a coherent way.

After the initial scoping phase that was undertaken jointly by CARET and the Computing Service, the project was taken on by the University Computing Service in 2006, leading to the launch of the service in October 2008.

Some of my thinking in this area is written up here: Multimedia Encoding Workflow, Multiformat Media Delivery, Video Distribution. These days (some 4 years later) there a quite a few projects that seek to implement this methodology, most notably http://www.opencastproject.org, see also OpenCast.