Putting Your Television Signal on Your Web Site

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April 7, 1998

You have several options for how you can put your television signal on your Web site:

• Create on-demand content from selected clips -- A common approach for people with many hours of video content who want to provide highlight or promotional clips rather than broadcast their television programming live.
• Offer your signal on a continuous live basis -- A good approach when you want to target people who aren't normally near a television, such as people at work, so they can tune in when late-breaking news happens.

NBC4, the NBC television affiliate in Los Angeles at http://www.nbc4la.com , is using Windows Media Services to play video clips of segments and promotional spots for the next newscast (click the Video On Demand button). David Pugh, Webmaster, shares his tips on how to successfully implement Windows Media Technologies for television content.

1. Get the raw media. For NBC4, that means 15- or 30-second videotaped promotional spots. These spots are supplied by their promotions department, and highlight what will be covered at each of their afternoon/evening newscasts.
2. Capture the video. NBC4 uses hardware-encoding by using the Pinnacle Systems Miro DC30 Plus video capture card. This card allows them to capture on a Windows 95 PC at 30 frames per second and 320 x 240 screen size. Note that the resulting files are high-quality, but large; be sure to have lots of hard disk space available. Also, this card produces excellent results for on-demand content, but is not yet compatible with the Windows Media Encoder.
3. Convert to AVI. Because the Miro DC30 Plus captures to a motion JPEG or MJPEG format, David then takes the capture file into Adobe Premiere to edit the file if necessary, and then outputs it to an AVI file. When he selects Make Movie to output the AVI file, under the compression option, David sets frame rate at 15 and quality at 100%, and uses the Intel Indeo R.3.2 codec. Under Special Processing/Settings David also sets Noise Reduction to Gaussian.
4. Determine the bandwidth of each feed to offer. NBC4 offers feeds at 28.8 Kbps, 56 Kbps, and higher.
5. Calculate how much total bandwidth you'll need by estimating the total number of concurrent connections you will have for each bandwidth. NBC4 currently has one T-1 line to service all of the video feeds. So far, this has been sufficient since their site usage is spread throughout the day and the number of concurrent connections is fairly steady and relatively low.
6. Compress AVI to targeted bandwidths. To convert from AVI to ASF, David uses the Windows Media Encoder, which is part of the Windows Media Services Tools download . Here are David's suggestions for codecs to use for each bandwidth offered:
   
   

   Bandwidth	Audio Codec	Video Codec	FPS	Frame Size
   28.8 Kbps	MPEG Layer-3	MPEG-4	5	176 x 144
   56 Kbps	MPEG Layer-3	MPEG-4	10	176 x 144
   Higher than 56 Kbps	MPEG Layer-3	MPEG-4	15	176 x 224

7. Set up the Windows Media Services for unicast streaming of stored ASF files. David has found that the Windows Media Services is very similar to the Microsoft Internet Information Server in administration.
8. Create an ASX file.
9. Link to the feed from your HTML page or application or embed it into an HTML page.

Tip   Creating and managing content without some high levels of automation could have been a nightmare for David, considering that they don't have enough staff to dedicate to content creation, and because every day David must create promo clips for three different bandwidths (28.8 Kbps, 56 Kbps, and higher), and for four different newscasts (4:00 pm, 5:00 pm, 6:00 pm, 11:00 pm). So David uses Microsoft Internet Information Server Active Server Pages (ASP) to help automate the creation and management of the content. When the user comes into the site, they are asked to register, and then asked to specify their connection bandwidth. From there, David has written ASP scripts to create a new Web page for that customer depending on what time of day it is, and when the next newscast is. For example, if the user dials in at 2:00 pm and states that they are on a 28.8-Kbps modem, a page is generated automatically that contains the promo for the 4:00 newscast (the next one) at 28.8 Kbps. Similarly, if that same user connects in at 9:30 pm, they would automatically get a page containing a 28.8-Kbps promo for the 11:00 news since it's the next one up. For more information about Active Server Pages, see the Server area of the MSDN Online Web Workshop.

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Offering Your Signal on a Continuous Live Basis

Follow these steps to get a live video stream onto the Web:

1. Secure the source of the video. In most cases it will be an input from cable television or a satellite dish. Plug the video output into your capture card and make sure that it is functioning properly (both audio and video). A list of compatible video capture cards is available on the Windows Media Services product site.
2. Determine the bandwidth of each feed you will offer. Will you offer only 28.8-Kbps feeds, or a variety to accommodate users on high-speed modems?
3. Calculate how much bandwidth you'll need by estimating the total number of concurrent connections you will have for each bandwidth.
4. Set up the Windows Media Encoder (available in the Windows Media Services Tools installation ), once for each bandwidth content you plan to offer (e.g., one for 28.8 Kbps, one for 56 Kbps, and so on).
5. Set up the Windows Media Services.
6. Create an ASX file.
7. Link to the feed from your HTML page or application, or embed it into an HTML page.