SchoolCast

Objectives

The objective behind SchoolCast was to plan, to design, implement and bring to pilot utilisation a content delivery system, whereby a variety of multimedia files (internet, video, audio, image) could be multicast to 10 or more Irish schools using a 2-way satellite infrastructure, and cache the files at the school server for fast local access. The pilot also validated the service on high bandwidth terrestrial multicast networks through the collaboration of HEAnet.

The intention was to pilot test SchoolCast in schools in Ireland with a view to its take-up as a sustainable commercial service. Through the pilot the business case for such a service has been refined and elaborated. Key target clients include satellite service providers, educational stakeholder communities including national and regional schools portals, ministries of education and government agencies, schools and educational content providers.

Challenges

Specifically the project team focused on the following activities:

• Service management for a seamless delivery of services from registration and booking through to logging and monitoring,

• Snapshot-delivery of dynamic web sites,

• Use of pre-fetching to improve latency,

• Automatic overnight distribution (push) of content,

• Booking of downloads for delivery within a certain time,

• Bandwidth management to optimally utilize given link for asynchronous delivery,

• Content management on the client side (filtering and visualisation),

• Streaming content delivery.

Plan

Phase 1: Design: 1 June 2004 – 16 July 2004

• Design plans and functional specifications,

• User specifications with pilot user groups.

Phase 2: Development: 16 July 2004 – 30 January 2005

• Beta version content delivery system,

• Programming of Database, the Management System, the Logging Server, the Scheduling Server and the Multicast Server.

Phase 3: Validation Phase: 1 February 2005 – 31 May 2005

• Pilot management and testing of the entire end-to-end service and individual component parts,

• Validation of the service via terrestrial network of HEAnet.

Phase 4: Continuation of validation phase and enhancement of service functionalities: 1 August 2005 – 30 November 2005

• Continuation of Pilot management and testing of the entire end-to-end service and individual component parts,


• Continued validation of the service via terrestrial network of HEAnet,


• Development of enhanced functionality linked to incremental updating of snapshots, multimple channel multicasts and encryption/subscriptions.

Phase 5: Exploitation: 1 June 2005 – 30 November 2005

Current Status

Following its successful pilot phase which ran from February 2005 to December 2005, the SchoolCast project is now finished.

An evaluation of the teachers who took part is on-going with NCTE, the main stakeholder representative who is responsible for the new Schools Broadband Access Network launched in Ireland. NCTE with the input of HEAnet, who are technically managing the Schools Network, are actively considering the take-up of SchoolCast in the next round of development linked to the schools network in Ireland.

Meanwhile the SchoolCast partnership continues between the 4 companies involved. ATiT, GCS and Intel are focused on opportunities in Ireland and Greece, while ATiT, Web-Sat and GCS are following opportunities in Sub-Saharan Africa.