Open University of Hong Kong-Education

Twenty-four lecture halls record themselves, and one administrator runs the estate from a browser.

The challenge

A distance-teaching university lives or dies on what it can put online after the lecture. OUHK needed every lecture captured — camera, PC, visualiser, microphone and line audio — and it needed the recordings to reach students who were never in the room. Just as important, the media manager had to be able to see what each hall was doing and operate each recorder without walking the building, and the resulting library needed real user and permission management rather than a shared folder.

What Reach deployed

A Bee 8 recorder in every hall takes the same signal set — HD camera, PC or visualiser, microphone and line — encodes it and sends the stream to Media Center. Manager Lite maps one recorder to one hall, so an operator always knows which device belongs to which room. Media Center publishes live streams and on-demand files, serves download for offline study, accepts third-party video and enforces per-user rights.

How it works

1. Each hall records locally. A lecture is encoded and stored on its own Bee 8, so a network fault does not lose the lecture.
2. Manager Lite shows the state of every recorder and lets the administrator start, stop or configure one hall or all of them.
3. Media Center publishes. Live for students on campus or at home, on demand for everyone else.
4. Rights decide who may watch, download or upload. The library is not one shared password.

Outcome

• One manager operates twenty-four recorders from a single screen.
• Live, on-demand and download are served from the same platform, for large numbers of concurrent users.
• Third-party and legacy video can be uploaded into the same library.
• Online trimming removes the minutes before the lecture starts.

Equipment at a glance