Center Creates Streaming Connection for White House
Wed Sep 16 2009
When the White House calls, you've got to be ready.
The Center for Educational Technologies on Tuesday established a dedicated high-quality Flash stream over the Internet for the White House to share with its blog readers the live video feed of a news conference at Ames Research Center featuring Vivek Kundra, White House federal chief information officer.
Kundra outlined his vision for a new federal government cloud computing initiative. NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver and top Silicon Valley information technology leaders attended the news conference. Though the event was broadcast live on NASA Television, the White House requested a special streaming connection.
eTouch Systems Corp., which manages all of NASA's external web delivery, asked the Center for Educational Technologies to establish the connection because of the center's reliable performance in streaming NASA shuttle missions as well as the cutting edge resources available at the facility, said Don Watson, manager of video services for the center.
David Valliere, federal program manager of eTouch Systems, coordinated the technical efforts with Hans Cathcart, senior technical project manager at Akamai, and Naga Srinivas, NASA portal project manager for eTouch Systems.
"The phone call from Dave to set this up caught me off guard during a live sports broadcast just the evening before the live event," Watson said. "With a stadium PA sound system blasting in the background, all I could make out of the phone call was, 'The White House wants a flash stream.' Tuesday evening Hans, Naga, and myself set up a special flash web stream, tested different quality variables, and then passed the URL listing to the White House personnel.
In order to ensure a very high quality and reliable live web stream, the live Flash streaming system was selected. It provides a better quality viewing experience in small format or full frame mode.
