Cornell Information Technologies (CIT) is about to make it easier to add video to your website.

With CIT's video services, faculty and staff will not need to maintain their own infrastructure for video streaming or master the technical details of formatting and compression. They will simply upload their video to CIT. The video will be served from an external host, and CIT will provide embedding code to be included on a website. Major users like the Blackboard course support system, the Lab of Ornithology's All About Birds site, and CornellCast will have dedicated channels through CIT's Video Platform Service.

CIT plans to roll out a version of the service for casual users, to be known as Video on Demand, by the end of the calendar year. It will cost less than doing it with your own server, said Andy Page, CIT information technology area manager, "not including care and feeding."

The services are built on the Kaltura open-source video content management system managed by Kaltura Inc., co-founded by Shay David, Ph.D. '08. Level 3 Communications Inc. provides the video streaming servers.

Visit the CIT website for more information on Video on Demand. Larger users should explore the Video Platform Service.