Media project brings Internet TV

A pilot project that’s underway this week is giving a small group of students in the UW residences access to 11 television channels on their computers — Movieola, TVOntario, an all-soccer channel and others. As bugs are worked out, about 100 students will be involved before the end of this term.

“It’s full-screen, broadcast-quality television,” says Sean Van Koughnett, director of UW Graphics and the project manager of an initiative to bring electronic innovations to the residences and eventually the rest of the campus.

“It’s called the Media and Mobility Network Project,” Van Koughnett said, “but it’s really a bunch of projects under one umbrella.” The Internet television is one part of MMNP, a small-scale introduction of Voice over Internet Protocol telephone service to residence rooms is another part, and some cellphone projects are on the horizon, he said.

MMNP is well behind its original, optimistic schedule, and some aspects of it will take months more, particularly some pieces related to on-campus cellphone service. Still, lots was learned from some small-scale tests last winter and spring, and the Internet-TV project is seen as a concrete step forward.

Most students in residence don’t have subscribe to cable TV — it’s expensive and awkward — and although Internet video is popular, there are issues with quality, copyright, and bandwidth. “Our IPTV solution uses multicasting technology and is not going to put that strain on the network,” Van Koughnett said, and it won’t count against the daily and monthly bandwidth limits on Resnet. The channels are being fed to UW through Orion, the Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network.

The guinea pigs for the experiment, the first of its kind in Canada, are some of the “residence computer consultants”, students who are paid to represent the housing IT service the various Villages. “They’re kind of the techies in residence,” says Van Koughnett, and he expects them to have patience with the early stages of the project. “We’re in a testing and debugging mode, and our IPTV solution isn’t flawless — the feed periodically breaks up for a few seconds,” he warned this week, adding that “we are working diligently with our vendors” to fix things.

The project is being done in cooperation with a British startup company, Inuk Networks, who provide IPTV and voice-over-Internet (VOIP) telephone service to more than 100,000 students at campuses in the United Kingdom and who established a Canadian office this year.

“I view this as the first step into the future of television viewing in residence,” he says. “The next steps will involve working on more interactive features, as well as establishing the type of on-demand services that students have come to want and expect. As well, it’s hoped that we can eventually introduce different types of content, such as international channels that you wouldn’t be able to access cost effectively from traditional cable or satellite.”

The residence techies will have something else to try out very soon, as they’ll be offered VOIP phone service under Inuk’s Freewire brand. UW residence rooms are all equipped with landline phones, Van Koughnett points out, and the total cost is backbreaking, at a time when most students prefer to chat on cellphones anyway or use existing VOIP services such as Skype.

“We want to develop a plan to get rid of the landlines,” he says, and the first step is to establish a more cost-effective VOIP service. “Long term, the vision is to develop a cell phone service that enables students to talk, text and surf wherever they are on campus for much less than what they currently have to pay.”

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Workplace conference starts Sunday

UW's 50th anniversary conference on the future of work — "2017: The Workplace" — will get going Sunday morning in the Davis Centre and continue with three days of discussion about workers' health, demographics, technological change, e-portfolios, productivity, leadership, and, of course, co-op education.

Speakers include such well-known public figures as Malcolm Gladwell, Richard Florida and Jim Balsillie, as well as a number of UW academics. The conference is being sponsored by UW's department of co-operative education and career services, and is organized as three one-day events: one for researchers and academics on Sunday, one for "leaders" on Monday, and one for employers and human resources experts on Tuesday.

"The rapid growth of the knowledge economy, globalization, changing demographics, new technologies, increasing worker mobility and the millennial generation have created significant challenges in the world of work," publicity for the 2017 conference notes. "This new world raises fundamental questions about how the workplace can respond to and prepare for a landscape that is increasingly fluid and unpredictable. . . . Together we will look through the lens of the past decade’s successes and lessons learned to envision the future workplace."

The first day promises "a forum where participants and presenters can share ideas and discuss opportunities with an emphasis on the application or ability to apply research and knowledge in the workplace. The future will be represented by a graduate student poster session, inviting entries from across the day’s four themes: Society and Culture, Technology, Education, and Health." The day begins with a plenary session in which Frances Westley (left), Chair in Social Innovation as part of the new Social Innovation Generation (SiG at Waterloo) initiative, will speak. Later in the day, participants will hear from Tracy Penny Light of the history department, Bob Sproule of accountancy, and Wendi Adair of psychology, among others.

Monday is the marquee day, featuring a keynote talk by UW dean of arts Ken Coates, onstage "interviews" in which writer Gladwell will pose questions to businessman Balsillie and University of Toronto dean Roger Martin, panel discussions, and another keynote by Florida, who recently brought his work as a futurist to U of T's Rotman School of Management.

Monday events will be held in the Sybase building in the north campus Research and Technology Park. A simulcast aimed at students will be available all day (8:15 to 4:15) in the great hall of the Student Life Centre.

Tuesday, finally, will be a day for "co-op employers, HR specialists and professionals", with sessions held in Federation Hall. CECS director Peggy Jarvie will introduce the day and be followed by such speakers as Christine McIver of the Grand Valley Human Resource Professionals Association, Edgardo Perez of Homewood Health Centre, and Nicolas Crook and Dan McCauley of Towers Perrin, as well as UW's Dave Kibble (information systems and technology) and Scott Davis (CECS).

"We are at capacity for Monday and Tuesday," says Karalee Clerk of CECS, who's been organizing the conference for the past year. She said that means 150 top executives at Monday's session and 250 HR people at Tuesday's. About 100 participants are expected for Sunday's academic discussions.

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'Rocky Horror' leads off drama season

They’ll be doing the time warp in the wee hours in the Theatre of the Arts next month, as UW’s drama department presents “The Rocky Horror Show” as its first production of the 2007-08 year.

A midnight performance on November 10 — the sort of thing your mother warned you about — will be set off by performances at the more sedate hour of 8 p.m. November 8-9 and 15-17, as well as a 7 p.m. performance on the 10th.

Rocky Horror “has become a cult classic,” says a drama department publicity release, “garnering an enormous following of devoted fans since its premiere in 1973. It is an emblem of counter culture, attracting the part of our selves that feels like an outsider. . . . The play draws upon many sources, ranging from 19th-century novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to the 1950s double feature B movie.” (Right: a 2005 production at the University of Wisconsin, River Falls.)

But surely none of those sources involve fishnet stockings and "a Sweet Transvestite from Transsexual Transylvania"? Anyway, the drama department is promising “classical rock tunes, frothy fun, and a solid dose of gender-bending frivolity”, and notes that “you will be invited to participate! Director Anne-Marie Donovan will make sure of that.”

Coming later in the season are “Alice (Experiments) in Wonderland”, described as “a multi-point telematic performance for children and adults”, opening January 24; “Differ/end: The Caledonia Project”, a collaborative class project based on the recent land claim dispute in Caledonia, Brant County, opening February 7; and Molière’s classic comedy “Tartuffe”, opening March 13.

CAR

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