Congratulations Class of 2012!
As you can imagine, coordinating commencement events requires collaboration from many departments across campus. Part of Information Technology Services (ITS)’s responsibility is recording and streaming the ceremony over the Internet. This is a fun project for us, but one that requires a great deal of pre-planning and coordination.
This project has two components, live streaming of PSU’s commencement to viewers on the Internet and capturing and archiving the audio and video. To ensure that all things run smoothly, we contract with two wonderful New Hampshire companies who help us with this annual event. EVP Creative assists us by recording and providing professional video production services and MFi Productions provides specialized equipment and professional audio support for this large-scale event.
ITS technicians take a feed from both these vendors to use for our stream to the Internet. This year we sent our primary web stream over Amazon’s Web Services cloud, which uses Adobe’s Flash Media Server to convert video and audio into a form that can be sent over the Internet. Amazon’s service allowed us to serve a wide variety of computers and mobile devices because it permitted streaming in multiple formats simultaneously. allowing everyone to enjoy commencement. Streaming video in all these formats enables us to serve a wide variety of computers, mobile devices and web browsers allowing everyone to enjoy commencement.
This year, there were 244 people around the world who tuned-in to the stream. The viewers were located as far away as Boston, California, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Florida, North Dakota, Indiana, Hawaii, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Peru, Venezuela and more.
We are always thrilled when we can help family and friends watch their loved ones on such a momentous occasion. This year through the means of technology, it was really a perfect day for our graduates and their families around the globe.
