Wowza Boosts Student Learning at Hundreds of Universities

Posted by Derrick on December 22, 2009 under Video Streaming and Compression | 2 Comments to Read

As digital video and audio grow into a preferred communications media on campuses across the world, Wowza Media Systems, the media server software company, announced that more than 500 universities and colleges on four continents are using Wowza Media Server technology to deliver live, on demand and interactive content to students and faculty on multiple players and devices, including Flash and iPhone.

The collegiate market is among the most aggressive adopters of streaming media technology solutions as the modern campus expands beyond the traditional four walls of classrooms, labs and lecture halls and the Internet is an increasingly inseparable component of learning curriculum. According to Reuters, the online education sector grew 13 percent last year and had been growing at about 20 percent in previous years.

“Universities are discovering that lecture capture is a competitive advantage and of great benefit to ‘millennial’ learners, who are accustomed to convenience and to on-demand access to myriad content sources,” said Alan Greenberg, Senior Analyst & Partner at Wainhouse Research in his recent report The Distance Education and e-Learning Landscape Volume 2: Videoconferencing, Streaming and Capture Systems for Learning . “The beauty of streaming and lecture capture today is that they are more affordable than ever before.”

In addition to powering streaming in hundreds of institutions of higher learning across the Americas, Europe and Asia, Wowza now holds 39 percent share of the collegiate market on the Australian continent. In one deployment, the University of New South Wales in Sydney found the Wowza servers to be much more cost effective and easier to maintain than its separate legacy QuickTime and Windows streaming servers, which the university is now planning to retire.

“With Wowza Media Server 2 we are able to consolidate our media resources onto a single platform, while also opening the door to new campus IPTV and iPhone streaming capabilities for our UNSWTV and lecture recording services,” said Patrick Stoddart, Manager of Web and Innovation at the University of New South Wales. “The multi-client reach and flexibility of the Wowza server has made it an essential technology component underpinning our online media strategy.”

Many other universities are leveraging the Wowza Media Server’s iPhone and IPTV streaming capabilities to expand enrollment and make courses and other content such as athletics widely available outside of a brick and mortar environment. The University of Sussex in Britain, a leading research university rated in the top five percent of all universities worldwide by the 2009 Times Higher Education University World Rankings, has deployed Wowza media servers to enhance learning options for its more than 10,000 students.

“Our first deployment of the Wowza streaming technology was instrumental in powering our Live TV Production course last year,” said Dr. Phil Watten, Media Technology Manager for the School of Informatics, University of Sussex. “That was an ideal proving ground for Wowza and we have since begun to roll it out across a number of other university courses to deliver televised lectures to Flash desktop players and soon to unify our iPhone delivery.”

“Wowza is focused on helping educators make learning more accessible and affordable by using online video content,” said Dave Stubenvoll, CEO and Co-Founder, Wowza Media Systems. “Performance and extensibility with solutions like Wowza are especially valuable in the collegiate setting where the appetite for streaming media across multiple player platforms continues to outpace the level of available IT personnel and technology resources.”

Wowza Media Server was named Best Server Hardware/Software in the Streaming Media Readers’ Choice Awards in 2008 and 2009, and received the 2009 Best Innovation award for Wowza Media Server 2 which extends this proven platform beyond Flash with multi-protocol streaming to the iPhone/iPod touch and other mobile devices, the Silverlight player, QuickTime, and IPTV set-top boxes.