Case Study: Webcasting Fosters Better Parents in Washington

The DIS began experimenting with Webcasting internally within its offices in 1998 and initiated the Web workshop approach in June 2001. Then, in October 2001, they "really kicked off" their Webcasting services, says Klosterman, with a special Webcast event live from the Central Washington State Fair. There a panel of experts convened to discuss how foster parents could help their kids cope with the trauma September 11 caused. A live audience of local foster parents and community members was allowed to ask questions, and the program was Webcast live for remote foster parents.

That event was a sort of trial run for Webcast foster parent training, and its success made it a model for future sessions. Since then the Institute has conducted seven Webcast training workshops, with more planned for the future.

The Horsepower Under the Hood
For its streaming services Washington State’s Department of Information Services uses a Helix server from RealNetworks. Why do they use Real? Well, it’s tradition. When DIS first started streaming back in the late 1990s, "Real was the top dog in the running at that time," says DIS multimedia developer Dan Steeby. In the interim, Real has updated the Helix server to stream Windows Media as well as the RealVideo format. That simplifies Steeby’s job and provides cost savings because, he says, "Now we can offer more than just Real, and we don’t have to own multiple servers to do it."

Steeby says the main drawback to being a Real shop is "security issues at the client end with agencies that don’t have permission to use Real." He goes on to explain that security fears have caused many state agencies to "lock down their desktops" so staff users can’t download or install unapproved software. Consequently, many Washington government PCs don’t have RealPlayer installed on them. They have only the Windows Media Player that came with the PC when it was purchased.

The DIS Interactive Technologies unit encodes in all three formats and in multiple bitrates from 28Kbps to 256Kbps, according to Steeby. They realize that many of the state’s foster parents are limited to dial-up connections, and so they do what they can to optimize the video streams for "the dial-up crowd," he says.

Production Lessons and Best Practices
Washington’s DIS has been offering video services for years and so is well-versed in the art of video production for broadcast and recording. But when they began to do streaming video, they needed to shift their mindsets a bit to adjust to the idiosyncrasies of this new medium.

Klosterman says that video professionals who switch to video streaming need to fight their natural inclinations to want to do more to make things look sophisticated. She believes that instead, they need to discipline themselves to do less. "Our motto is ‘simple pictures are best,’" she says.