Multimedia communications come of age at ECS

Dave Tarrant and students at IBM Hursley

Copyright: Steve Shrimpton

A group of students from ECS, the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, are currently showcasing the new ECS-TV service at the Blue Fusion Science Week event at IBM’s Hursley Research Lab.

ECS-TV is already providing a television service over the School’s wired and wireless network, using the latest IPv6 infrastructure.

The multichannel TV service, which will eventually be extended to cover the whole University, is already testing broadcasts of ECS lectures, the School DVD, Simply the Best, and movie trailers of films currently showing at the Odeon in Southampton.

ECS-TV plans to offer ‘television’-like programs for both educational and recreational purposes and thanks to the BBC, ECS-TV is able to stream Freeview TV channels on computers throughout the School.

Cameras which will installed in various lecture theatres within the School will provide a live lecture/seminar service as well as creating recordings for later viewing via the secure web-based video on demand system.

According to Dr Tim Chown, who leads the IPv6 initiative in Southampton: ‘ECS-TV realises the coming of age of multimedia communications. It also represents the next generation of educational computing.’

The undergraduate project leader is David Tarrant . ‘The heart of ECS-TV is an infrastructure that adapts, selects and distributes content on demand,’ he says. ‘We can meet the requirements of students or conference guests, while conserving precious bandwidth by utilizing multicast IPv6 technologies.’

The idea behind ECS-TV was drawn from a number of research projects in ECS but was set up by a few keen and skilled undergraduate students in their spare time. Originally part of IBM's Linux Challenge project, ECS-TV harnesses the enhanced networking abilities of the Linux operating system to stream multimedia content direct to your desktop.

ECS-TV has now become a major standalone project gaining high interest from all members of the school.

ECS-TV has been operating each day at the IBM Blue Fusion event, and has attracted a great deal of interest and enthusiasm from the local school students who have been visiting the event.

The students involved in ECS-TV are: Dave Tarrant, Neil Lock, Kevin Lee, Kulraj Salh, Lee Moffatt, Ivans Lubenko, Peter Stavroulakis, Leander Hambley, Toby Hunt, Phillip Boulien, Mat Johns, and Timothy Boardman.