| March 2007 |
| By Calvin Tullos |
I work on the Hubble Space Telescope project for NASA. I've been on the project for 22 years now and my job/duties/responsibilities have changed numerous times. For the past 6 years, I have been in charge of running the streaming media (webcasting) systems as well as video conference systems.
Day-to-day, I interact with customers scheduling their streaming media events, preparing the website, controlling cameras and microphones, encoding the audio and video, and posting the archived products for viewing. We use a Video Toaster for video switching, a Niagara 5229 PC for encoding RealMedia and a PowerEdge 285 PC for serving.
Most of the events we cover are for educational purposes and/or sharing data and ideas from one scientist to the next. From the user statistics, we have viewers from all over the world and on the order of several thousand viewers per month. The skills needed involve a high level of expertise and paying close attention to numerous details. Video quality is our biggest challenge. Customer service is always important. These events are 'real-time' in nature, and trouble shooting on-the-fly is often necessary.
Interacting with nervous speakers, Ph.D.’s with massive egos, and people whom in general, are not technically aware (in the realm of audio/visual environments) is a constant challenge.
The video conferencing side of my job started out slow (4 years ago) and has gotten busier and busier. We are using Polycom FX and VSX systems, IP and ISDN. Video Conferencing is very straight forward. The way it seems, either it works or it doesn't! Firewalls (by design) create a few obstacles. The hardest part is actually very mundane; scheduling tests and the actual conference, taking into consideration different time zones. Just last week, I had to test with a user in Australia. I needed to come in on Sunday at 5pm to match their 9am Monday morning.
Just a few years ago, the notion of video on the web was not very popular and technically challenging. Expansion in bandwidth and video devices has certainly opened this up. The decrease in travel after 9/11 (in my opinion) made my job more secure and busier.
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