Acting as a virtual CDN inside the campus firewall as well as a 4-channel live streaming encoder delivering content to virtually any destination in any resolution, MediaDS™ from NewTek and Wowza is proving to be the go-to delivery solution for schools seeking a reliable, immediate, and streamlined media distribution system.

Media instructors and managers from opposite ends of the country are eagerly sharing the story of their success thanks to the revolutionary real-time encoding and live streaming video delivery platform.

“It's been a game-changer for us,” said Mark Lowrie, media teacher at Marion L. Steele High School in Amherst, Ohio. “We now have something that we can count on, and it couldn't be easier. I don't have to set up anything. I turn on the computer, and when we're ready to send the signal, I click one button. It's magic.”

Gary Farrell, the Theaters and Facilities Supervisor for the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District (PYLUSD), based in Placentia, CA, agrees, “MediaDS is a breakthrough solution that integrates four independent, real-time encoding/streaming channels into a single, turnkey device. We consider MediaDS to be a tremendous value.”

Whether it is news, announcements, graduations, concerts, plays, sports, graduations or other live events, the result for both schools is the delivery of high-quality live video to viewers both on campus and around the world.

MediaDS is the first-of-its-kind single-box solution for media producers looking to host their own content delivery system. It effectively and efficiently brings live and recorded content to a user’s own website, Facebook Live, Microsoft Azure, UStream, YouTube, Wowza, and other video and social platforms.

One major benefit of the MediaDS system lies within its ability to be unconstrained by bandwidth issues experienced when using an external content delivery network.

At Marion L. Steele, the school was creating award winning news productions each morning. But a change in the network infrastructure resulted in heavy buffering that hamstrung the quality of the broadcast. Sending a signal outside of the school’s firewall to an external content delivery network and then back into the school was overwhelming the school’s internal network as each individual classroom was receiving an independent, dedicated signal from the CDN and causing it to crash.

The MediaDS provided a simple fix to the problem, resulting in a crystal-clear signal.

"With the MediaDS system set up, we were able to send a link to all classrooms," Lowrie said. "The teachers go to the link every day. They click one button and the quality they see is like I'm looking at a monitor in the control room.”

Meanwhile, at the PYLUSD, viewers tune in to watch live and on demand media streams from literally around the world.

“Live streams of our students’ events have been watched by family members in over 20 different countries around the world,” Farrell said. “This streaming capability is valuable to our community because it allows family members who live or work outside the district to share in special moments that they would otherwise have missed.”

Read the full stories at Marion L. Steele High School and PYLUSD. 

For more information on the MediaDS, visit: https://www.newtek.com/mds1/