Cable TV without the Cable!
George Casper
Information Services and Resources, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania 17837
Introduction
Responding to a request from the Bucknell Student Government,
Bucknell University rolled out the BUTV system to the campus in the
fall of 2004. During the planning stages, a range of possibilities were
reviewed. Most buildings lacked co-axial cable, but every building on
campus had cat-5 cabling to rooms, and fiber-optic connections
between buildings. Therefore, a decision was made to chose IPTV
technology instead of adding co-axial cable infrastructure.
Through the initial phases of testing, to the campus-wide rollout,
and from there, later changes in set-top box technology and the
middleware supplied by our vendor, there have been many issues that
have been addressed. In addition to technological and logistical
challenges, issues arising from billing consumers of the service and
maintaining the security of the system from bright and perhaps
unscrupulous students have also taught us valuable lessons.
The Bertrand Library, the heart and
soul of the University, and home of
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
the Technology Support Desk, which
are needed to see this picture.
co-ordinates providing students
access to BUTV
Motivation & Pilot Program
TV in dorms has long been desired by the student body. The initial
request from the Bucknell Student Government came to ISR in 2001.
Many of our peer schools have offered cable for years, and the lack of
cable television was a particular source of unhappiness for many of
our students who found themselves in rural PA, “close to America’s
agricultural traditions,” and far away from vibrant night-life or diverse
cultural experiences.
Initial experiments in providing streaming movies were not
particularly well received, and plans to run co-axial cable went
nowhere after the large infrastructure expenditure needed (approx.
$2.5 million) became apparent. In 2003, following up on continued
interest from the Bucknell Student Government, a decision was made
to leverage our existing data network to provide television
programming.
An important initial discussion centered around funding for the
program. There was a significant body of students who felt that the
service should be “free,” in the sense that the fees were made by
increasing the cost of tuition or room charges. Since this would have
required the approval of the University Board of Trustees for the
increase, as well as being unfair to students who did not wish to take
advantage of the service, it was eventually decided that the cost should
be borne by the students who chose to use the service.
A pilot program was run in a few of the dorms in the spring of
2004, and proved very popular. At the same time, some students found
the service confusing, and the test revealed some network issues that
needed to be addressed before we went live in the fall of 2004.
One unfortunate effect of deciding to go live in the fall of 2004
was that our student employees did not have a chance to become
familiar with troubleshooting set-top boxes before the fall semester
started; while normally our student employees are deployed to the
dorms during move-in weekend, their own inexperience with the boxes
made it a trying time for everyone involved.
Challenges
Technical
• Older Cisco 3500 switches did not support Quality-of-
Service and multicasting to the degree needed
• A bug was discovered in Cisco’s switches leading to poor
service
• Eventual shortage of the initial set-top box
• Provider switched middleware during the summer of 2007
• Students could use a widely-available media player to
watch content free of charge, in violation of our agreement
with the content provider
Social/Administrative
• High cost of the initial set-top boxes, particularly from the
point of view of upperclass students,
• Student difficulty in setting up the box and provisioning
content
• Registering students was an arduous manual process
Mid-course corrections
• New, cheaper, less failure-prone set top boxes became
available in the summer of 2007
• Closer monitoring of the content streams by our network
administrator
• The new middleware greatly improved the registration
process
Technical Challenges
One of the first problems we noticed existed with our Cisco 3500
switches. They only offered a two-state QoS model, and did not
multicast efficiently, offering reduced performance for our users. The
solution to that problem was to replace about 60 of the 3500 switches
with 3550, which had much better QoS and multicast support.
We also encountered a bug in the switch software which would
sometimes result in packets being re-broadcast to the set-top boxes,
which would then get them out of synch. The problem was difficult to
track down, and eventually required Cisco to make an on-site visit to
verify the problem. Cisco shortly afterwards supplied us with a
firmware update that resolved the issue.
By the spring of 2007, the original supply of RCA IP900 set-top
boxes was running critically low, and no more were to be found - they
were no longer in production, and supplies had run out with every
vendor we contacted. In consultation with our content provider, who
was planning on a middleware change, we ended up chosing the
Amino set-top box as a replacement. In addition to being widely
available, it had a smaller form factor, faster performance, and a lower
price.
During the summer of 2007, D&E switched their IPTV
middleware to Athena 3.0. They worked closely with us to test both
our exisiting IP900 boxes as well as the new Amino boxes, and
because we were prepared, the transition went smoothly.
One particularly unexpected technical challenge arose from our
students. Using the VLC media player, they were able to view to
BUTV multicast streams without purchasing a subscription. This first
arose, understandably enough, as a result student curiosity about how
BUTV worked. However, mice will always find the shortest path to
the cheese, and once it became common knowledge on how to view
BUTV though VLC, the draw of “Free TV that you don’t need an
expensive set-top box to watch, and you can save to your hard drive,”
was impossible for many students to resist - exactly the situation that
we are contractually obligated to D&E to prevent.
To address this, our network engineer developed some tools to
monitor activity at the switch level, to collect reports on what IPs and
MACs were watching different multicast streams, and disabling
student network ports as appropriate. Once he began doing this, we
saw a sharp reduction of this form of unauthorized access.
Social/Administrative Challenges
One of the earliest challenges we faced was the student reaction to
our pricing. Initial fees were $248 for the set-top box, and $97 a
semester for content. This cost prevented many upperclass students
from using the program, since they felt that paying for a box they
would only use for a year or two to be a bad deal. The semester
content fee has since risen to $103, but the newer Amino boxes are
cheaper at $200, and incoming students are far more willing to buy
the box, since they’re guaranteed to get four years of use out of it.
Siginificant documentation of the system was written, and
each BUTV box “kit” comes with the appropriate accessory cabling
and a one-page document illustrating how the system should be set
up, both in terms of registering for content as well as the physical
wiring:
Despite our best attempts at documentation, significant
numbers of students need phone or in-room support every year to
use BUTV.
Another challenge was the clunky registration process we
had to work with initially. When the program started, students
would have to register in our campus portal, and then those
registrations needed to be hand-entered into a ponderous Java
middleware application; to process the 500 or so registrations took
one of our administrative assistants about three workdays to
complete. The new middleware automates much of this; all students
are pre-loaded into the provider’s database, and only the ones who
activate a set-top box and use the service are billed.
Conclusions & The Future
The campus community has been generally satisfied with BUTV, and
we plan on continuing to offer the service for the foreseeable future.
While the uptake was not as big as we had originally hoped, there has
been steady growth in the uptake by students.
We have learned that it is rather painful to implement a brand-
new service on short notice; the summer and early Fall of 2004 was a
difficult time, between unexpected network issues, uneven student
expectations, and our own lack of experience with the technology
produced troubleshooting headaches. Having technological
infrastructure in place isn’t enough - efficient billing and
administration of the system also proved to be vital to client
satisfaction. We also have learned that students will indeed try to use
the service in ways you - and your service provider - did not intend,
and only vigilance and careful network monitoring can keep that at
bay.
As new technologies come on-line, we will continue to integrate
them into our service. Currently, there is provider support from D&E
Communications for Hi-Definition service. We have the network
infrastructure to take advantage of this, but billing and logistical issues
have yet to be resolved - we do not have a streamlined way of
associating different users with different subscriptions to high-
definition channels, and billing them appropriately.
Similarly, access to premium channels is something that is on the
horizon, but there the aforementioned billing issues with high-
definition TV are compounded by the fact that D&E has not yet
negotiated an understanding with content providers that will allow the
content providers to provide encrypted streams of premium content to
our students.
Television straight to PCs is very much desired by our student
body, as shown by our student’s unauthorized experiments in that area,
but D&E has been very forward in letting us know it is absolutely not
allowed. This is a larger issue in the IPTV market, as consumers seek
to avoid buying expensive set-top boxes of (perceived) limited utility,
while the content providers seek to protect their revenue streams from
unlicensed duplication of their content.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Eric Smith, our network engineer, for providing much of the
technical background to this presentation, Jason Snyder and Isabella O’Neill for
providing background on the student point-of-view of the project, as well as long-
term history about the genesis of the project, Bud Hiller for suppling more recent
history, as well as his notes on an earlier presentation, and Janine Follmer for
processing hundreds of BUTV registrations each semester by hand. Thanks also go
out to the Bucknell Bookstore, who have partnered with us to sell the set-top boxes,
the Bucknell Finance Office and Lori Wilson for doing much of the work involved in
billing, the Bucknell Student Government, for bringing the issue to our attention and
making sure we satisfied the campus demand. Finally, and perhaps most importantly,
to ISR’s student employees, who have done so much of the legwork in making this
project a success for the campus.
For further information
Please contact casper@bucknell.edu to reach me directly, or techdesk@bucknell.edu
to reach Bucknell’s Technology Support Team
To view our campus BUTV website, please visit:
http://www.bucknell.edu/BUTV.xml
Quic kTime™ and a
TIFF (Unc ompres sed) dec ompres sor
are needed to see this pic ture.