Suggestions for School Video distribution

tunesmith1801 wrote on 4/21/2011, 7:18 AM

We have a video library of about 130 productions of school performances and functions. We are at present delivering these on DVD to families for a small charge.

I would like to setup a video subscription which would be a yearly fee and give the families access to the entire video library. They can download one or all of the videos.

Does anyone have a suggestion of how this can be done. I am thinking log on to our website enter a username and password. I would think the videos would need to be in something like an mp4, or am I off base.

Thanks - Jim

Comments

ChrisMN wrote on 4/21/2011, 8:05 AM

How many hours of video would there be? My initial thought is that this is going to be expensive to host online considering both the storage and potential bandwidth required.

Chris

richard-courtney wrote on 4/21/2011, 8:14 AM

Is your community served by only one cable tv company? If so, you might be able to make some arrangement
to multicast a scheduled IP distribution. That also assumes they have most of the internet market.

But like Chris said, I don't think you will find this less expensive than your current DVD method.

musicvid10 wrote on 4/21/2011, 8:38 AM

If each video is an hour in length, you need 120MB of server space at 2Mbs.
If they are two hours in length, you need 240MB.
You must take into consideration peak server bandwidth, as demand would be heavy following each new upload.

Look into a hosted solution such as Dropbox or Mediafire if you aren't wanting to stream.

You do need to look into privacy issues and not have the content available to the general public. Some people may not want their kids' images available on the internet, and I bet the school doesn't have a signed waiver on each and every one of them.

For encoding for the web, our research here may be of interest:
http://www.jazzythedog.com/testing/DNxHD/HD-Guide.aspx

richard-amirault wrote on 4/21/2011, 10:33 AM

I would like to setup a video subscription which would be a yearly fee and give the families access to the entire video library. They can download one or all of the videos.

Is that "download" or just view? Those are two different things.

tunesmith1801 wrote on 4/21/2011, 11:05 AM

I would like to set it up for download not streaming. II have Dropbox but the size is limited. I do use Pogoplug so I can stack hard drives and give them access to the video folder.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 4/21/2011, 11:31 AM

Honestly I'm not sure how well this will work out. I'm 99% sure people will get the videos & then hand them out to friends.