UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
Customer: Paul Riismandel, Manager, Digital Media
Production & Support
Website: http://www.atlas.uiuc.edu
Industry: Education
RealNetworks Business Customer Since: 1996

What does your organization do?
We provide technology support services to the departments and administration in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois. My area within ATLAS is Digital Media Production & Support. We produce video programs both in studio and on location, using single-camera and multi-camera techniques.

Which RealNetworks technologies are you using?
Helix Server Unlimited, RealProducer, and RealPlayer.

How do you use streaming media?
We began using streaming media as a replacement for traditional physical media, like audio cassettes, and media labs. We made the full transition to streaming in 2000. At this time streaming has almost entirely replaced physical media for most needs.

Streaming is used extensively in order to:

	Make it easier for students and faculty to attend virtual lectures, conferences and events that their schedules might otherwise prevent them from experiencing.
	Allow faculty to re-use guest lectures and other special class presentations in future semesters without having to re-invite the guest, who often is not able to return each year. The videos of these lectures can then simply be assigned to students to watch in-class or as homework, out-of-class.
	Help instructors in evaluating student performance when students are called upon to give class presentations.
	Record and stream class lectures for many advanced courses in the sciences that cover complex materials in a visual fashion.

A nice result of using streaming has been that high degree of satisfaction that faculty and students express about the quality and convenience of the media we create for them.

What specific problem did you want Real to help you solve?
The challenge was figuring out how to serve a growing student population with important curricular media without having to invest in more physical media resources.

Real's implementation of SureStream made it easy for us to support both low and high-bandwidth users in a simple way that wasn't confusing to the user. All users could use the same link, but get the proper bit rate media for their internet connection. Using SureStream all but eliminated our tech support calls for playback issues.

Using SMIL also enhances the user-friendliness of our streaming media. We are able to provide a link to a SMIL file to our users prior to a live event or an archive event that has yet to be recorded.

What features did Real products offer that competing products lack?
The fact that RealPlayer is available on Windows, Mac and Linux makes our world much easier because it means we don't have to do multiple encodes for most purposes.

The fact that RealNetworks has added QuickTime, MPEG and Windows Media support over the years has convinced us to stick with Real. Although the Helix Server is not free, the benefit of having to run only one streaming server platform is a cost-savings when it comes to administration and labor.

Which specific product features or solutions proved most valuable?
The most valuable features have been SureStream and SMIL, for the reasons already stated, the robustness of the Helix Server, its scalability and the ease of administering it.

How did Real's technology enable you to meet your A/V business challenges?
Real provided an easy-to-administrate robust and scalable server infrastructure for providing streaming media to a large base of over 15,000 students and faculty. Real's SureStream technology combined with the cross-platform compatibility of the RealPlayer mean that we only have to do a single encode into a single file for most of our media. But we are still assured that our media will work for nearly all of our users, whether they are on Macs, PCs or Linux boxes.

Helix's support for streaming Windows Media, QuickTime and MPEG4 means that we do have the ability to accommodate other formats when the need arises without having to run multiple platforms. We're not locked into a single media format, which increases our flexibility in choosing other streaming applications, such as course recording systems.