Recognised as one of the finest institutions in British higher education, City University London has trained some of the UK’s leading figures since its creation in 1894. It is also the home of the Sir John Cass Business School (CASS), one of the global elite of business schools that hold the gold standard of ‘triple-crown’ accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the Association of MBAs (AMBA) and the European Quality Improvement System (EQUIS).
To ensure that it keeps providing the highest quality of education in a connected world, City University London deployed an Exterity IP video system, which facilitates the streaming of HD video material to all staff and students throughout its central London campus.
The challenge
With multiple locations, faculties and its own broadcast studio, City University London needed to deliver a wide range of content around its campus. To achieve this, the university was looking for a robust, flexible and secure IP video system that could stream different HD video content from multiple sources to each department, including feeds from the university’s Sky Sports subscription, portable cameras used to capture live events and international news channels recorded continuously. The Exterity enterprise IP video system offered a perfect solution for all the university’s requirements, from robustness through to scalability, flexibility and ease of use and monitoring.
The solution
Given the university’s requirements to distribute multiple video feeds in real-time and in HD throughout the campus directly over the university’s IP network, higher education integrator specialist, Discovery Business Solutions (DBS), specified the Exterity end-to-end enterprise IP video system.
The Exterity AvediaServer is at the core of the system and acts as the central delivery point on the network for live video feeds, digital signage, lecture capture and video on demand. Using the Exterity video on demand systems, the university can also effectively capture, store and distribute content regardless of its source or end point. This allows specific users to upload and capture content for playback across the network, such as video from the broadcast studio managed by the student office.
In addition, Exterity Artio middleware enables the university to offer different screen layouts and interactivity in multiple locations. For example, the student canteen can display different messages on a daily basis, and professors can use video material as part of their study material both during and after the lecture.
The result
Ricci Fothergill, City University London, explained: “For us at City University London, the choice of partner was clear. We chose Exterity because they took their time to understand our requirements to design and install a solution that perfectly fit our needs.”
The Exterity system enables the City University to continuously record international channels relevant to each faculty, allowing students and professors to use relevant content, regardless of the courses.
By incorporating a satellite dish and Sky receivers into the IP video mix, students and faculty members can also watch the university’s Sky Sports subscription services, while the Exterity portable IPTV encoders enable on-campus channels to broadcast their content from any location on the network, ensuring that entertainment and education content can be shared throughout the university. This even lets City University offer live basketball matches and international lectures held on campus.
“In an increasingly competitive environment, universities have to offer much more than high quality courses and improved career prospects; increasingly, students take into account the amount of entertainment and information they can receive on campus, especially when they’re far from home,” said Colin Farquhar, CEO at Exterity.
“Seeing elite establishments like City University London use our system proves that universities value high quality content, from international channels to football games and guest professors offering a course. In addition, this provides the opportunity for the university broadcast studio to showcase the quality of their students’ work, helping develop the talents of tomorrow.”
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