The KMi Stadium project has supported a vast range of educational webcasting experiments within the Open University and external clients. The logistics of managing such events from a web based access point of view has led to the development Stadium Backlot System.

The Stadium Backlot system facilitates the management and maintenance of both live web casts and replays. The management hierarchy allows for the organisation of multiple venues, or event groupings. In the Open University sample venues range from the Berrill Lecture Theatre, one of our main large auditoria, to our Sound and Vision Studios; an example of an event grouping would range from a course webcast series, to the vice-chancellors open management meetings.

All the audience accessible pages generated by Stadium Backlot, are defined by header, footer and template files, and it is therefore relatively easy to change the appearance of any given Stadium.

The content of the dynamically created audience web pages are based on the time, the viewers location, and who they are. Consequently, the events list page shows the current status of events in the system, and viewable by the person from their current location.

The web page listing events at the Berrill Lecture Theatre.

The web pages presenting a web cast event's details show the title, date, speakers, venue and description of the event. Prior to the event this page also contains a downloadable calendar file, and it refreshes regularly to check to see if the event is ready to go live.

At this point buttons appear on the web page to allow the audience to enter the event (usually there will be several buttons to allow the audience to pick a data rate applicable to their internet connection). After the event the managers of the Backlot system can enable similar launch buttons for viewing replays of the event.

An example of a title page of an event replay.

The management of Stadium Backlot is via secure web page access (i.e. username and password system). Editing and adding data to the system is via web based forms. Managers of the system can have varying privileges from access right across all Stadium to just specific tasks within specific Stadium.

An example of the type of detailed management available.

Management tasks include:
Adding new Stadium
Editing Stadium
Adding/Editing Events, including uploading relevant media etc.
Approving Events
Adding/Editing speaker details
Adding/Editing managers

Example Stadiums:
Berrill – http://stadium.open.ac.uk/berrill/
KMi Podium – http://stadium.open.ac.uk/podium/
AUA stadium - http://stadium.open.ac.uk/aua/
Webcast@OU - http://stadium.open.ac.uk/webcast-ou/