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The new portal for streaming services in the Netherlands
by Johan Oomen
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision / Webstroom
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SURFnet and the Webstroom community for streaming media in higher education have joined hands in building a completely renewed portal where a whole range of valuable resources can be found. The result is a one-stop-shop for students, teachers and producers where they can browse through a large and ever growing collection of video assets as well as being inspired by other projects, get in touch with peers and so on.
The website http://video.surfnet.nl combines the following:
The SURFnet Video Portal was commissioned by the SURFnet, the organization responsible for maintaining one of the fastest research networks in the world. The portal offers authorized users functionalities to upload video assets and metadata to the central server using intuitive tools. It's also possible to upload only the metadata and refer to an external file. Searches are conducted in separate interfaces, allowing users to make (extensive) queries on the material, following the Dublin Core annotation scheme. There are thousands of assets already on-line and more are added continuously.
Interactivity is offered, allowing the end-users to fully exploit the power of streaming media in education. People can manage assets in collection, for example for each subject they teach. The new version of the video portal also integrates the virtual cutting tool; a web-based tool allowing users to set in-and-out markers within a stream, and generating different outputs. A new URL for example, that can be integrated in a electronic learning environment, allowing direct access to the predefined fragment.
And there's more good news. The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the Dutch Public Broadcasters recently announced a groundbreaking cooperation with SURF Services. A memorandum was signed on September 23, that will ensure the online delivery of material from public broadcasters for use within Higher Education. Already, over a thousand hours of archive material is accessible through the video portal, but after September 23, this number will steadily grow with new assets. Sound and Vision is the largest audiovisual archive in the Netherlands and the working archive of the Dutch Public Broadcasters. The SURF Services organization will act as intermediary and offer schools different contracts allowing teachers the possibility to search in the archive and request certain assets to be digitized in order to me used in her/his courses.
The launch of the http://video.surfnet.nl website is a landmark moment; different entities are now gathered in one place, allowing users to fully exploit the possibilities streaming media has to offer. Video files can be fully integrated in learning environments and become true learning objects. A long story short: streaming has really come of age.
More information: Contact Johan Oomen (joomen@beeldengeluid.nl). More information on the virtual cutting tool can be found at http://video.surfnet.nl/info/webstroom/english/English.jsp.
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