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.

Social media and graduation

The University's class of 2011 graduated over three days of ceremonies on campus just over a month ago.

For the first time, we made just a tiny effort to coordinate some social media activity around the event. The media would have us believe that everyone and their dog are using Twitter and such like to document their every move, so a big day like graduation would surely be all over social media. Wouldn't it?

What we did

We actually did very little to encourage or promote the use of social media. We did kick around ideas such as asking Greg Dyke, Chancellor of the University, to ask the ceremony audience to take photos and submit them, but we didn't want to run before we walked! So in the end, we just did the following:

• Posted a few tweets on the University's @uniofyork account announcing the official hashtag, #UoYGraduation
• Posted a message encouraging sharing on Facebook and mentioning the hashtag
• Added the hashtag to our digital signage displays around campus

Did anything happen?

There were 50 or so tweets featuring the hashtag, quite a number of which were retweets and a number of those were from other University accounts (see an archive on the #UoYGraduation TwapperKeeper record). We also kept a look out for @uniofyork mentions and combinations of keywords including york, university, graduation and graduate. Here there were quite a few more graduation-related updates, but still only in the dozens rather than the hundreds.

Intriguingly, there were mentions of lots of photos being online, but very few surfaced publicly so I suspect these all reside in private albums on Facebook. A few photos and a couple of videos have shown up on Flickr and YouTube respectively, but that's all.

Was it worth it?

I think it was worth a try. It was all very last-minute and we really didn't do very much to get the word out, so our expectations weren't particularly high but nor did it take much of our time. What was a bit of a surprise was the relative lack of unprompted activity. For all the media hype, it seems our recent graduates and their families are mostly not keen Twitter-ers.

Graduation on Storify.com

Despite the relatively low volume of activity, I stitched together a Storify.com story of the day which I think is actually quite neat. Check out the University of York Graduation 2011 on Storify to see for yourself.