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High Profile Event Award: Streaming Commencements to the World at East Carolina University

April 19, 2017

This is part of a continuing series highlighting the 2017 Enterprise Video Award finalists.

Challenge:

A university commencement is an exciting and monumental time for graduating students. They, rightfully so, want as many family members and friends to attend as possible, but lack of space at the event location and distance from loved ones often poses problems.

For the winter commencement in 2016, East Carolina University sought a way to make the ceremony available to everyone, despite time and distance.

Solution:

The university’s video production team used Mediasite to live stream the event in the Minges Coliseum to anyone around the world – a banner on the ECU home page linked to the live presentation.

“It’s not the first time that we’ve live streamed or even recorded commencements – We’ve been doing that for a couple years. But this is one of the first years where it was really featured prominently,” said Jarrett Shafer, ECU Mediasite administrator. “This had me a little concerned with a large number of people viewing one single live event at one time. I’m happy to say that our Mediasite system, our network and our servers performed flawlessly.”

Results:

To date, this is the largest event ECU has live streamed that has been viewed the most times.

ECU’s video production team used to produce and create content to be put on a local public access TV station. Now, it’s creating content to be put into Mediasite, where it can be streamed and distributed online.

Besides recording the commencement, the team also records other campus events, training videos for HR in the IT department, faculty interviews, guest speakers and more.

Additionally, ECU’s Brody School of Medicine began live streaming grand rounds twice each month. The recordings are made available to local and regional physicians and other medical professionals, who can then earn continuing medical education credits.

“With all these additional recordings outside of the traditional classroom-generated content, we’re starting to make use of the Mediasite Showcase,” Shafer said of the secure Mediasite video portal. “In this past year, one college has used the Showcase to highlight graduations, convocations and student interviews. With more and more live and hybrid events taking place, I can really see the Showcase becoming a great resource for quick access to content for the university community.”


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