Symfony Video, a streaming media service developed in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, is now available for free to Syracuse University.

The project is the brainchild of Andy Covell, director of information technology at Whitman.

‘This (idea) has been brewing in his head for years,’ said Scott Nadzan, an instructional technology analyst at Whitman.

The specifics of the project’s application within SU are in the preliminary stages, Covell said. He has presented the idea to several departments and said he hopes to have multiple departments using it by the end of the semester.

The project first began development in the summer of 2005. Whitman has provided most of the current video content, while Information Technology and Services provided funding.

Covell said he began the project with the intent to make the service freely available to non-profit organizations in the Central New York area. This aspect of the project, part of the university’s larger Syracuse Metropolitan Fiber Optic Network (Symfony) endeavor to connect various organizations in the city through several networks, is still being worked out.

For SU, Symfony Video allows academic departments to upload streaming video content to a central server.

The metadata associated with each video – descriptive information, links, credits and attachments associated with a video – is publishable to multiple department Web sites, but is hosted on a central database.

‘This is what separates Symfony from YouTube,’ said Jeremy Patterson, an IT Systems Architect at Whitman, who, along with Nadzan and Whitman computer consultant Jim Daley, has worked with Covell on the project. ‘In YouTube, you go only to one site where (the data) is stored.’

This would allow departments to share video and its associated metadata to their own and other departments’ Web sites without straining those sites’ servers, Patterson said.

‘This opens up a lot of opportunities for departments that don’t have sophisticated information technology support,’ said Neal Coffey, manager for the Video Production Unit at SU.

The technological capabilities of each department vary. Some are unable to offer streaming media support.

‘We run 12 different servers, but we don’t have one to run streaming video,’ said Dick Waghorne, Web designer for the College of Arts and Sciences. ‘So far, when people have approached us about using streaming videos, I’ve had to say, ‘Sorry, we don’t have the tech support.”

Departments capable of supporting streaming media have different methods for creating the content, Coffey said. For the VPU, which schools and departments can hire to help create educational or instructional video programs, processing these varied requests can become complicated.

The server hosting the content for Symfony Video right now supports only Windows Media files, one of several formats for streaming video.

‘Hopefully, Symfony will move us in the direction of standardization for streaming media,’ Coffey said.

A department can use the publishing software while hosting content on their own server; however, certain features of the service, such as the creation of preview thumbnails, will not work with other file types, Covell said.

If enough departments start using the service, Covell said, there is the possibility that a central ‘showcase’ Web site will be created for the university. The departments would be able to publish their content to this as well.

Symfony Video’s future at the university is fairly certain, but the plan for free service to non-profit organizations in the CNY area is waiting for funding.

On Aug. 4, Covell submitted a grant proposal to the CNY Community Foundation, a local organization that awards competitive grants for innovative community programs.

When the foundation’s board met on Sept. 27, the proposal was denied.

‘It wasn’t denied because of anything particularly terrible about it; we really liked it,’ said Matt Walz, a program associate at the foundation. ‘It was just a very competitive grant run.’

Covell has worked with the foundation during the last two weeks and a new proposal was submitted last Friday.

If the project receives funding, Covell said he hopes to create for the CNY area a showcase similar to the one planned for the university. A new server for CNY content and, possibly, a new database are also planned.

For now, Covell said he can only work with a few groups outside the university, with the hope that their use of Symfony Video will act as leverage into more funding.

‘There are a lot of things going on in the community that people don’t know about,’ Covell said. ‘This is one way … to find out about them.’

Published on October 14, 2006 at 12:00 pm