The Once and Future Video

New and exciting video technologies are beginning to appear that will change the way schools handle video programming in the future. And surprisingly, DVDs will probably make up only a small fraction of those emerging technologies. The real action will be happening online.

What will be the Next Big Thing? It's likely to be digital video delivery, also known as video on demand or digital streaming. Bob VanDerWege, a media coordinator for Kenai Peninsula Borough School District in Soldotna, AK, says that he is curious to "see where digital streaming goes, and how quickly." Digital streaming is not a brand-new technology, but it has not yet been used in most K–12 schools. Many librarians plan to use digital streaming alongside conventional DVDs. Wendy Sellers, an educational specialist for library information services with the Henrico County (VA) Public Schools, says that her district is thinking of purchasing DVDs to meet some of its anticipated video needs, such as the theatrical movies and plays used in literature classes or the History Channel programs used to introduce curriculum units. But for most science and math classes, Sellers says, teachers prefer short video segments or "clips."

Digital delivery enables video programs to be broadcast over a school's local area network from a centrally located server to one or more classrooms in the school. But since the amount of disk space required to store digital video is huge—individual video programs require about two megabytes per minute of storage space—schools will need to attach multi-gigabyte hard drives to their video servers. Digital delivery vendors now offer Web-based services that let teachers and students download video programming and watch it in the QuickTime or Windows Media Player formats.

United Streaming, one of these vendors, offers schools access to 20,000 downloadable educational video clips—most of them two to 10 minutes long—cataloged on the site by topic (such as geometry or weather), state standards, and grade level. (To see the service in action, visit www.unitedstreaming.com/information.)

Downloadable video, however, is a bandwidth hog, and two classrooms downloading and watching videos simultaneously will clog a T1 line to the point that the network slows to a crawl. To avoid that kind of gridlock, United Streaming Vice President Jim McColl says that many teachers download clips at night and show them to their students the next day. In fact, the company offers a Download Manager program that lets teachers automatically download clips to a classroom computer at four in the morning, so students can watch them later in the day, at a more learning-friendly hour.

With the rise of video programming that can be downloaded from the Web, the way some schools handle video is already changing. Now, an educational film may be available on tape, disk, or as a series of clips purchased from a media vendor, and that same film may be viewed in a streaming format or it may be downloaded and stored on a hard drive for later viewing. VHS may be fading as a home format, but there are still 120 million VCRs in our nation's homes, and uncountable thousands of VCRs and VHS tapes in our schools. VHS tapes will probably be in school libraries for another decade. By the time VHS leaves the scene, electronics stores will be selling new formats, such as the Advanced Optical Disk, a new format proposed by Toshiba and NEC, or the Blu-Ray disk proposed by another group of electronics companies including Philips and Sony. Both of these formats make it possible to store 20 gigabytes or more of data on a single DVD-sized disk (a typical DVD holds 4.7 gigabytes) and are designed for use with high-definition television. They're supposed to begin appearing in the electronics stores by the end of this year.

For the time being, of course, most librarians are still contemplating making the transition from VHS to DVD—and with good reason. The DVD format has several educational advantages over the aging VHS format. Most notably DVDs can accommodate up to seven different language tracks, plus a closed-caption option for those students with hearing impairments. Many English as a Second Language teachers realized early on that although a school with one or two Vietnamese-speaking students might not be able to justify the purchase of a single-language VHS tape, purchasing a DVD featuring multiple languages, including Spanish, Russian, Hmong, and Vietnamese, is a sound purchase. Kenai Peninsula's VanDerWege noted that although some DVD films are 10 to 20 percent more expensive than the VHS versions, they often include multiple language tracks that more than make up for the additional expense.

The other valuable feature of the DVD format is its ability to "chapter stop," or jump to a section of the disk so there's no need to fast forward or rewind the way you would with a videocassette. This feature is especially useful for showing segments of a program to a class, but unfortunately, not all educational video programs offer it. When you decide to make the leap to DVD, watch out for disks in which a producer has moved a program over from VHS to DVD without adding things like the language tracks and the chapter stops.

Most public libraries have started ordering feature films on DVDs. But there's currently not much demand for DVDs from schools, and consequently, there are few educational videos available in the DVD format. It's a classic chicken-or-the-egg dilemma: many education vendors don't sell DVDs because they say there's little demand for them, while many schools are hesitating about purchasing DVD players because only a small percentage of education programming is available in that format.

"It will be five to seven years for DVD to become the 'king of the hill' in the school market," estimates Andrew Schlessinger, CEO of the Library Video Company, which sells videotapes and DVDs to school and public libraries, as well as CEO of Schlessinger Media, which produces educational video programs for schools. The Library Video Company catalog, he says, presently contains approximately 14,000 educational video programs, but only about 1,000 of those programs are available in DVD format. Schlessinger says that the typical video setup in K–12 schools consists of some VCRs in the classrooms, and two or three DVD players on carts that can be borrowed from the library. "School librarians want to make sure what they buy gets used, and right now that means VHS tapes," he says. "It doesn't matter how great DVD is until [vendors] have the item you or your teachers want." In the meantime, many librarians are ordering combination players, which play both VHS and DVD formats, to get them through the anticipated transition period. Or, like VanDerWege, they're ready to take a calculated risk. "Although I've made the decision to transition over to DVDs, I'm very concerned that it may not be a long-lived medium," he admits. "I debated about staying with VHS until the next phase comes along, but DVD adds enough features that it's difficult to ignore."

Walter Minkel is SLJ's technology editor.