Driftwood

John Balogh, Tom Bayly, Ken Miller, Scott Reed, Sven Schulz

Meeting notes:

Update on OSTN -- a meeting is coming up this Thursday.

CATV -- service planning discussion.

Some what-ifs:

Commoditization of not only CATV for UP RHs; where (vendor name) provides
basic service level, but also consider opportunity for a
vendor convergence of commodity internet connectivity to include IPTV content. E.g., Verizon FiOS (not available here?) or something along the lines of ATT streaming video over an ATT I1 connection.

General strategy discussion:

Futures -- Define the level of service needed for CATV in the RHs. Perhaps legacy CATV is status quo, out of available channel space.

We should establish future requirements of CATV.

There are customers that we haven't considered yet -- we have CATV taps in
buildings for special interest programs which are currently carried over the
UP CATV system. These programs, such as the College of Communications
Weather, are high quality programs and would be valuable as streamed content
within PSU.

AN opportunity to listen, talk, sell, and explain network capabilities as well as provide some knowledge transfer towards how to stream PSU-produced video on the PSU IB.

------ End

I was fortunate to be included in a most useful discussion with RhondaB, JimmyV and key folks from OSTN. We were together to finalize the last few technical steps toward activation of the OSTN channel on the Portal. We're very close and need to take a breath while the agreement makes its way up the chain.

The current OSTN offerings are multicast or unicast using MPEG-4. Offerings plural, as OSTN offers a set of services and is actively developing new ideas on how to further leverage network capabilities for video sources. The new stuff promises to be open source and seeks to improve an already robust and affordable means to stream video.

The future offerings will require multicast (yeah!) be in place for end user networks to successfully receive streams and will have a much broader set of options for locally created content as well as specialty video content such as foreign language channels, Al Jezeera and other notable sources.

I'm keen on working with OSTN to better understand their direction and how we can be participants in testing our collective ideas. In one of our next IPTV meetings we will include OSTN folks to discuss our ideas and directions prior to planning for some cycle time for actual testing.

--Phil