A Fantastic Day!!!
May. 27, 2008 by ravishan
What a great day it was on Sunday… The excitement was unmistakable and crowds were much more than normal. And everyone I have spoken to, who were either here to witness the ceremonies in person or were watching it on the web, loved the speech by Senator Obama as well as the remarks by President Roth. Both of them were very inspiring and this will remain one of the best and most memorable event in many of our memories.
Some of us were fortunate to be part of the planning committee that was convened to make sure everything went well after the announcement that Senator Obama will be the commencement speaker. In an email to the ITS staff I already touched on many of the items. ITS was involved in printing and distributing the tickets to all graduates – which got done in record time on Friday because of a great team effort. We also helped print an additional 3000 copies of the Commencement booklet (which took over 14 hours to do – between Friday and Saturday afternoon).
We were fortunate to be told that “do what you need to make sure that the event is recorded properly and webcast anticipating heavy usage”. Our IMS staff were able to find Conover productions to quickly put together a proposal including outsourcing the webcasting. Our webcasting server and network could not have handled the actual numbers we saw and it was also a risk that I was not willing to take for an important event like this – a single point of failure. Most of the webcasters outside have multiple redundant setup all over the country and in some cases around the world.
While talking to a couple of the vendors, I learned a fair amount – in general everyone had a cap on how many simultaneous Quicktime streams they will support (about 1000)… Whereas they will support upwards of 10000 Windows media streams, no problem.
So, a couple of us saw the whole production in action, right from the time they laid all the cables, tested the fiber feed from the chapel to the fifth floor, to the actual live work. There were feeds from three cameras that the producer chooses from, then instructs the camera people on any adjustments, another technician looks carefully at the Commencement Booklet to type the text that then gets mixed in with the video feed, then there are a few others monitoring the audio and the final feed. There were three outputs of the feed. One was going to the outsourced webcasting server which then was broadcasting to everyone who connected to our site from outside our network. One was going to our internal streaming server and the other was a video feed that got mixed in with our Comcast feed which was used in a few simulcast locations.
Every 15 times we also got an update from the webcast vendor on the actual number of simultaneous users. I was carefully watching this because I had a generous, but limit on how much I could spend on the webcast… Luckily we did not cross the limit. We had 3000 simultaneous viewers at peak!!! That is 5-6 times the volume we traditionally see during commencement.
As I wrote to the ITS staff, I am very proud of all the work that everyone did. It truly was a great teamwork. We also helped with some of the last minute communications and worked with numerous other administrative staff.
You can view the pictures that I took during the commencement here.