Deployment of Research Media Portal (e-Seminar)

In December 2002 a new version of Research Media Portal (formerly known as e-Seminar) was deployed across IBM Research sites.

Research Media Portal (or e-Seminar) is an initiative to allow all Research employees access to videos of seminars, presentations and other events at any IBM Research campus. The initiative facilitates an increased use of digital video by lowering the cost and complexity thresholds for the use of video in live applications.

The new Research Media Portal is based on an elaborate content management network, the Media Distribution Utility, which has been developed at the Automated Media Systems department of IBM Research.

MDU consists of a few supervisory and redirection servers, Regional Servers, and many streaming servers, Media Appliances (MA), strategically located at research campuses worldwide and places where there is a concentration of users.

The Research Media Portal (an application server, e.g. the server which hosts the Research Media Portal) as well as clients/users of the applications, are totally outside this network.

The newly deployed Research Media Portal makes two significant changes from the prior approach (the legacy e-Seminar):

• There is only one web site (portal), the one in Watson. All users (clients) come here to select videos.
• The videos that are selected for viewing are streamed from a server at the client's local site, and the content of that server is managed dynamically and automatically by the MDU functionalities.

When a client in a remote site, Beijing, for example, comes to the Research Media Portal (at Watson, NY) and selects a video, the IP address of the client is used to "redirect" the request to the appropriate MA from which the video will be streamed; that MA is the one located in Beijing.

The new Research Media Portal significantly facilitates management of the system and makes efficient use of the network and computing resources.