Technology Overview

ECS-TV takes advantage of many cutting edge technologies to provide high quality of service without sacraficing network bandwidth. Television like (non interactive) services are provided via Multicast IPv6 which works in a very similar way to digital terestrial television. Interactive programs and lectures are provided direct to the client (unicast) where content is viewed in a browser with other embedded information provided which is applicable to the stream.

ECS-TV Live (Multicast)

Multicast data is transmitted once from a central point (broadcast node) and can be picked up by any number of client nodes simultaniously.

ECS-TV uses organisation local, embedded RP (rendezvous point) IPv6 multicast addressing. Organisation local addressing ensures that the traffic does not propegate beyond the University's IPv6 network (a /48). A rendezvous point is embedded in the multicast address and informs routers where to go to connect to this multicast group. This type of address is specified by the prefix FF78: which is followed by the address of the RP and then the multicast group.

The ECS-TV server is connected to a MLDv2 snooping aware network. Upon a client requesting a connection to a multicast group, both the routers and the switches work in conjection with each other so that only that client recieves the requested data. Previously in a non-aware network a request from one client would cause the multicast data to be tranmitted to everyone connected to that switch.

The School of Electronics and Computer Science building has a fully deployed dual stack (IPv4 and IPv6) network and ECS-TV facilities are available both on the wired and wireless networks.

Streams are all available via the player and method of access varies depending on the type of stream you wish to access.

Worldwide test streams are currently offline, however we are constantly testing technologies with our academic partners in UKERNA and LeNSE. ECS-TV Channel 1 occasionally offers exclusive worldwide content and any event are listed on the home page. For constantly running world wide streams also see our partners at Surge Radio who also offer more advanced streaming using multicast, available here.

ECS-TV Interactive ECS-TVi provides pre-recorded programs on demand via an interactive web interface. By using a browser plugin (vlc) which can be used in gecko based browsers such as Mozilla, ECS-TVi is able to syncronize multimedia video/audio with static slide content. Video content is transcoded on the server into MOV format at cif resolution (320x240) however a high bitrate is used to preserve the highest quality at this size. ECS-TVi can be watched outside of the University campus however a faster ADSL connection is required (1Mbit+).

ECS-TV Podcasts+ ECS-TV Podcasts contain most of the recorded content from within the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. ECS-TV uses the already in place infrustructure to quickly and powerfully take any source of raw material and convert this into many formats including the common video podcast format. The podcasts feeds themeselves are also managed via the ECS-TV central system allowing many users to add, modify or delete content from a podcast feed via their browsers. The Podcast+ service also provides higher quality of video than that of a conventional video podcast. These include videos more suitable for watching on a conventional TV as well as some HD (720p and 1080i) content which is now being made available. ECS-TV also supports the schools own podcasting service by providing the infrastructure and servers on which this service is hosted.

For more information please feel free to contact us, we can provide more information on any of the equipment or technology used to run the ECS-TV service.