BETV PILOT SYSTEM
The aims of the Broadband Educational Television pilot were to:
1. demonstrate a range of BETV services
2. demonstrate immediate delivery strategies
3. demonstrate trial BETV technology and architecture
4. re-purpose existing assets
5. produce new 'Broadband Ready' materials
6. identify new asset requirements and partners
7. develop the early stages of a Theoretical Cognitive Framework
8. develop new production strategies
9. forecast large-scale production costs

Using and integrating the latest technology from Telestream, Virage, and IBM, Open Mind oversaw the provision of a powerful end-to-end solution which seamlessly integrated media acquisition, encoding, indexing, management and distribution of streaming media.

Original Pearson content was first digitized into broadcast quality MPEG2 files, using a Telestream ClipMail Pro encoding/delivery appliance, which were then delivered via TCP/IP to FlipFactory software running on an IBM server. FlipFactory, which automatically reformats media into virtually any streaming format and bit rate, was used in the Pearson project to simultaneously encode the source file into multiple versions of QuickTime 4 streaming media (at 40kb, 256kb and 400kb data rates) and to send these files to an IBM Content Manager and Video Charger server and storage cluster for delivery to web clients. FlipFactory also extracted closed-caption data (a transcript of each programme) from the MPEG2 file and published this, along with links of all the streaming media versions, to the Virage VideoLogger indexing and media management application. This process created searchable metadata (through sub-titles, content descriptions, and even keywords in the dialogue).

The BETV pilot was the first project to make use of new FlipFactory software features, which included enhanced integration with Virage closed captioning extraction and notification.

The end result was that 200 hours of the Pearson tape-based libraries, together with several interactive CDROMs, were transferred into a fast, efficient, searchable digital online library. Users could search the system, contextually or using free text, for subjects of interest. The users would then select the streaming content they wanted, point to which ever version best suited their bandwidth connection, and retrieve and view the relevant part of the original material, from anywhere on the Internet.

The pilot system, running in our offices in London, was demonstrated live to the IBM stand at the NAB exhibition in Las Vegas in 2001.