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New York State Track Meet Tests Web Broadcasts
April 19, 1999

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By Kelly Jackson Higgins The neck-and-neck race between a hometown freshman and a nationally ranked junior in the final leg of the girls' 1,500 meters mesmerized fans watching the New York State High School Indoor Track & Field Championships this past February. Many of those fans saw the race on the Web, watching--in near-TV quality-- the veteran from Half Hollow Hills, N.Y., win by 8/100 of a second.

The broadcast was historic: The eight-hour track championship held at Syracuse University's Carrier Dome was the first athletic event ever shown live on the Web, at 20 frames per second in 320x240-pixel resolution, about half the resolution of a TV broadcast. "The casual observer can't tell the difference between these streams on a TV versus on a computer," says Kamal Jabbour, associate professor of computer engineering and director of Central New York Advanced Course in Engineering at Syracuse, who headed up the Web broadcast.

Jabbour and his team of computer engineering students built the video-broadcast network into Syracuse's campus backbone with RealNetworks RealProducer Plus streaming video technology, 10- and 100-Mbps Ethernet, NT Servers, a Windows95 machine, some video cameras and a DS-3 connection to the Internet. Several mirror sites on campus and at other universities enabled load distribution. "I saw about 40 simultaneous streams maximum on the server," Jabbour says.

Network Computing's Real-World Labs® on the Syracuse campus ran the main video server, a 300-MHz Pentium II machine with a 100-Mbps Ethernet connection. The video feed required a minimum bandwidth of 220 Kbps, so only viewers with cable modems, ADSL (Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line) or corporate LAN connections could watch the meet Webcast. To avoid saturating the 10-Mbps Ethernet LANs at Syracuse, Jabbour and his team diverted the video traffic out of the Carrier Dome onto a dedicated 10-Mbps LAN, streamed it onto the Network Computing server, and then out over the Internet.

But things didn't run like clockwork. The morning of the meet, the university lost one of its key Unix servers for gathering network statistics from remote sites when a member of the computer support staff, oblivious to the broadcast, took down the server to replace its hard drive. Jabbour quickly gained access to another Unix server on campus.

Jabbour is now "packaging" the hardware, software and settings used by Syracuse University for other organizations that want to run near-TV quality Webcasts. And for next year's track championship, the school's engineers are planning TV-quality video on the Web, with simultaneous streams so viewers can choose the events they want to watch. Jabbour predicts that during the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia, viewers will be able to tune in on the Web in TV quality with about a 28-second delay.

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