Columbia J-School students to contribute Election Night remotes via IP

The Journalism School of Columbia University is expanding its presidential Election Night coverage Nov. 4 to include a live streaming video component in addition to its radio coverage.

Student journalists on location will rely on Streambox ACT-L3 software encoder systems to facilitate the live video webcast. The Streambox solution will enable students to gather live reports to supplement the election webcast as well as content for new media and TV broadcast during the academic year.

The student journalists, all graduate students, will be involved in producing Columbia's election Web site, designed to provide hands-on experience in all newsgathering and news production disciplines.

Using up to four laptops running the Streambox ACT-L3 software encoder, students will be able to capture and encode live video from field locations and transport it over low-bandwidth IP connections to the journalism school's TV control room, where it will be output to a Flash server and streamed to the election Web site. Early testing of the Streambox system using 3G WiFi express cards has yielded transmission speeds as high as 800kb/s.

For more information, visit www.streambox.com.