OT: Delivering Video over the web, the last mile

busterkeaton wrote on 12/18/2007, 10:54 AM
Hi,

A colleague is working on a project where his videos are being shown to a class of school children. Each child is going to be at a workstation and each child gets a customized video playlist. Videos are probably between 2-4 min each, Flash format, progressively downloaded. The company providing the content contracted with another vendor to do the encoding. They encoded at 400x300 500kbps, 30 frames a sec. So the problem is the school only has a t1 line. There will be 20-25 children per class and the T1 can't keep up. The videos were originally shot for broadcast and keeping onscreen text readable is a concern.

Anyone know what bitrate we would have to use to deal with the real world capacity of a T1 and up to 25 students.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 12/18/2007, 11:12 AM
T1 is about 1534Kbps. Divide that by 25 and you get 61Kbps. Pretty darned low, well below useful. To serve up 25 simultaneous 500Kbps streams with a bit of overhead you'd need about 10 T1 lines. You could probably get a T3 cheaper than 10 T1s. Do you live in an area with FIOS available? That's about 3 to 5 times the speed of T1 so you might be able to get away with 3 FIOS lines, and they're way cheaper than a T.

Do the videos have to stream? How many videos are involved? What's the total size of the collection? Can't the school download them all to a local server ahead of time? That strikes me as a much better solution.
busterkeaton wrote on 12/18/2007, 11:51 AM
they are looking into doing a local cache if the content provider agrees.

It's over 1,000 videos. I don't think we have control over what connection they use or upgrading their connection.