Even without CATV wiring in their dorm rooms, Northwestern University students can watch 23 television channels on their computers in their dorm rooms. Northwestern University Information Technology and NU Student Affairs use technology developed by Video Furnace LLC to provide NUTV to students.

Several issues had to be addressed during the development of this service. The data network had to be configured to allow a fixed number of users to connect to the service. Content providers had to understand this distribution mechanism so that they could pay their licensing fees to the content owners. Attention had to be paid to the number of MPEG2 software decoders in use by the service so that those fees could be paid appropriately. A mechanism insuring legal clients were viewing the material had to be developed. And then there was the question of recording... A follow-on service with CSPAN and CSPAN2, in which the license to redistribute comes from the content owner itself, had its own unique challenges.

NUIT will demonstrate how NUTV works, how these copyright issues were dealt with, and the futures for this now one-year old service.

About the Presenter
Tim Ward is Associate Director of Telecommunications and Network Services, part of Information Technology at Northwestern Universtiy. He manages staff that provide and maintain the operational integrity of the voice, video, data and radio frequency infrastructures and services at Northwestern. Tim has been working in information technology for 11 years, and for seven years in telecommunications and network engineering. A long-time advocate of IP multicast for video delivery, he has been a member of the Internet2 Multicast Working Group since its inception.