Faculty and staff now have a free, university-provided way to put videos on the Web in support of the Cornell mission. With the new Video on Demand service from Cornell Information Technologies (CIT), it takes just a few quick steps.

"The Video on Demand service provides a solution for faculty or staff to embed video in their blog, wiki, Web page or other Web presence," said Andrew Page, video collaboration services manager for CIT. No technical expertise is needed, he said. Users simply upload their videos to CIT, which supplies embedding code for the Web page. The service handles the technical details of formatting and compression, and the video is streamed from an off-campus server.

A faculty or staff member can post up to 20 videos over the course of a year, with a maximum duration of four hours, at no charge. The limitation on the amount of video each person can post is based on the amount of available server space, CIT technicians said.

Both the Video on Demand service and the Video Platform service are built on the Kaltura open-source video content management system provided by Kaltura, co-founded by Shay David, Ph.D. '08. Level 3 Communications provides the video streaming servers. Kaltura software is being used on about 150,000 websites, the company reported.

For those whose needs for media management and delivery exceed the capacity of the Video on Demand service, CIT recently launched a large-scale, fee-based service called the Video Platform Service, currently used by University Communications, Cornell Library, Academic Technologies and the Lab of Ornithology. The Video Platform Service will be available to other interested departments and units starting in April.

"The Video Platform Service provides a campus architecture on which colleges and units can build complex or high-capacity video applications," said Page.

For more information on Video on Demand, see http://www.it.cornell.edu/services/vod/. For details on the Video Platform Service see http://www.it.cornell.edu/services/vps/.