More than 30 people died of SARS in Toronto in 2003, the most to succumb to the disease outside of Asia. So when fears of an avian flu pandemic began to surface, physician educators at Toronto's Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre (S&W) decided to prepare medical professionals before cases started coming in the door.
Dr. Mary Vearncombe, S&W's medical director of infection prevention and control, briefed physicians and nurses during a lecture last December. Unfortunately, the Centre's McLaughlin Auditorium only had seats for 1,000, well below the number of clinicians who needed to be brought up to speed. No problem -- thanks to S&W's online medical multimedia library, which can provide access to streamed lectures and presentations at broadband quality, hundreds were able to watch Dr. Vearncombe live on their PCs. A thousand more have since surfed to the online multimedia library to see Pandemic Influenza Planning at their own convenience.
"When we went through SARS, we learned that dissemination of crucial information was unbelievably important in identifying and containing public health emergencies," said Oliver Tsai, S&W's director of information technology. "That's why we got the word out fast, using our Mediasite online medical library. It is an extremely powerful webcasting tool that has been very easy for us to deploy, and highly effective in letting physicians see presentations either live or after the fact. Since we're a teaching facility fully affiliated with the University of Toronto, being able to reach our 10,000-strong local audience is vital. Moving to the Web has made this possible."
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Complete Solution
Imagine being able to feed your live presentations -- audio, video, and graphics -- directly to a third party who then packages it for online access through a multi-window Web site. The third party takes care of all the formatting, streaming, and access details; all users have to do is log onto the site to watch streaming video in one window and any PowerPoint graphic displays in another.
The best part is that, beyond feeding them the content via a broadband Internet connection, your work is done. The third party can do everything, including storing your content on its servers for future access, and even providing a search engine that allows users to drill down through the multimedia library not just for presentation topics, but actual subjects discussed during various events.
This, in a nutshell, is what Sonic Foundry's Mediasite does for clients such as S&W. "We take the feeds captured by our clients and repackage them for easy multimedia access over the Web," said Rimas Buinevicius, president and CEO of Sonic Foundry. "It is even possible for our customers to specify levels of access to their content libraries, both for security reasons and selling subscription access to outside users."
Functionally, Mediasite is based on a number of discreet components. For S&W, the video feeds from the auditorium go directly into Mediasite RL440 Rich Media Recorders. They then serve the feeds down the Web to a Mediasite LX Server housed in one of S&W's data centers.
From there, S&W's presentations can be provided to Web users live, after the event, or both. They can also be burned to CD or DVD, or even stored on portable USB devices.
The Mediasite user interface is quite sophisticated. On the left upper corner is an AV streaming window, which plays the feed using the Windows Media Player. This occupies the upper left third of the screen, with a VCR-style control bar, Information Guide text window (displaying details about the event), and Image Index navigation bar taking up the lower left third.
Meanwhile, the center and right two-thirds of the Mediasite GUI is dominated by a graphics window. All of the images are shown at 1600x1200 high resolution, and the sources can be everything from PowerPoint and tablet PCs to electronic whiteboards, document cameras, and DVD/VHS feeds.
Ready For Launch
The educators at S&W have wanted to establish an online multimedia library for years. We initially conceived of the idea back in 2001," said Tsai. "Back then the dot com boom was in full force, and it made sense to take advantage of the geographic reach offered by the Internet."
However, the technology wasn't up to the task in 2001, Tsai told Government Video. "Launching a multimedia library five years ago would have required our users to load special viewing software on their PCs, and the quality of streaming video just wasn't up to par, especially because broadband was relatively rare in those days. So we decided to wait until the situation matured, he said.
Fast forward to 2005: With SARS still a painful memory and avian flu on the horizon, S&W decided it was time to act. "Even as recently as last year, Mediasite was the only real option for delivering the kind of open standard multimedia access that we want to provide," noted Tsai. "As well, the fact that users could access the site using a conventional Web browser, and that Sonic Foundry would handle all of the formatting, archiving, and file serving, were major plusses."
"The actual deployment was extremely easy," he added. "It was really plug-and-play. We just put the Mediasite appliances and LX Server into our data center, hooked up the video feeds, and then made them available to the Internet through our 100 MB connection. Now that they're in place, there's nothing to using them. We just pre-schedule the event feeds, then the presenters just plug in their equipment at the appointed time and start."
It's been six months since S&W's multimedia library went online, and according to Tsai, there have been no technical issues. Besides serving live feeds successfully, Mediasite's search engine makes it possible for users to search the library by presenter name, topic, or keywords. "It can also handle feeds not just from S&W's McLaughlin auditorium, but auditorium and lecture theatre facilities in our three campuses spread across Toronto, Tsai added. This is important, because it just isn't possible for our clients to get to every single event, especially if they are out of town."
At present, S&W's Mediasite-based library is free and open to the world. However, S&W may take advantage of Mediasite's controlled access capabilities, in order to launch a password-protected pay site. "As a publicly-funded institution, we are always looking for new forms of revenue generation," Tsai explained.
In the meantime, Tsai is genuinely pleased with the performance of S&W's multimedia library. "This is exactly what we had hoped to do five years ago," he said. "It wasn't possible back then, but thanks to Mediasite, it is possible now."
MORE INFO
Sonic Foundry www.sonicfoundry.com
Sunnybrook & Women's College Health Sciences Centre www.sw.ca
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