Streaming graduation

Around 1,600 students graduated over the course of three ceremonies last Friday and two on Saturday, alongside four honorary graduates and several thousand family and friends. For the first time, we also streamed the ceremonies online so that remote audiences could share in the event.

As this was a low-key pilot of running a live stream of the ceremonies, we only announced that they would be viewable online the day before the first ceremony. At that point we put a prominent link on the University homepage, on the graduation web pages and shared the news on our Twitter and Facebook presences.

Viewing stats

We were pretty pleased with how the streaming went. A large number of people accessed the stream, including many who watched for extended periods. A very simple summary in numbers:

• ~2,500 unique pageviews of the video page
• Visits from 68 countries
• 20% of visits from mobile devices (inc. tablets)
• 450Gb data streamed from server

I put together a few slides containing a more detailed breakdown which you can see below.

Behind the scenes

For the techies reading, I'll attempt to describe how the footage made its way to the web, but my involvement (and expertise!) was pretty well limited to putting the embed code in a page to display the player. The fine folk in our AV team dealt with the on-site setup and encoding, and we used a third-party to handle the streaming broadcast.

The video footage itself was being produced and directed live by a third party supplier, Visions Unlimited, who were on site to film the ceremonies for DVD (you can buy a DVD of any ceremony since 2010).

We ran the video footage through a PC running Flash Media Encoder, and uploaded it to a third-party streaming video provider. They took care of trans-coding the footage into two formats - one for Flash-supporting devices and one for everything else (principally iOS devices) - and load-balancing the traffic so that we could scale up the provision if a lot of people tuned in. The footage was embedded into the page using JWPlayer, with a separate link for non-Flash devices.