Sky TV across a network.

[mick70]

A possible project at work is looming, can anyone shed any light on a solution?

A tv "sky news" live feed needs to be distributed from one point across a network of computers (win 98) to be viewed. The actual viewing screens are in elevators in a tall building.
My company will be doing the work but I bet you lot can enlighten me on how they will do it. As always, thanks in advance for any help/comments/insults!!

[Stuart]

Technically, this should be fairly easy to do. However, I should point out that unless you have permission from Sky for viewing their channels on commercial premises, then you will be breaking the law.

Assuming you have permission, and assuming you have network connections at all the points you will be having monitors, then it is quite easy.

You connect a sky digibox to a PC with a TV card. This PC runs Windows Media Encoder, which is used to send the Windows Media encoded transmission to a Windows 2000 Server machine, running Windows Media Services. This server will broadcast the data it recieves from the Windows Media Encoder.

If you are using less than 50 machines, you can possibly skip the Windows Media Server and just attach straight to the Encoder. The advantage of going through the Windows Media Server is that the amount of users you can have is limited only by the speed of the network. You could, in theory, have 1000s of users attached to one Windows Media Server. In fact , when I was learning to use Windows Media Server, running on a Pentium II 266, I used the User simulator you get with the Windows Media Software Developer's kit, and was able to get 1,200 simulated users to access the broadcast. The only reason I couldn't go further is that doing this flooded the network connection on the machine running the simulator. The server did not appear to be under strain at all.
Windows Media Player on each machine can then connect to the broadcast coming from the the Windows Media Server.

[Gareth]

Yep, Stu C is right, we did a very similar thing at ACN during the World Cup. We had it displayed on a widescreen telly in the restaurant, and also broadcast it across the entire office, so people could watch it via WMP from their desk :)

[Tristan]

A possible project at work is looming, can anyone shed any light on a solution?

A tv "sky news" live feed needs to be distributed from one point across a network of computers (win 98) to be viewed. The actual viewing screens are in elevators in a tall building.
My company will be doing the work but I bet you lot can enlighten me on how they will do it. As always, thanks in advance for any help/comments/insults!!

Just really want to echo what Stuart said. It's pretty easy to do -- stick a TV card in a PC, then use something like Windows Media Encoder (if it's a Windows box) or MEncoder (if it's a Linux box) to stream it in a format that the other computers will understand.

The problem is that you could technically be considered to be rebroadcasting the signal, which would be illegal. However, from a practical point of view, so long as it's strictly on the display machines only (i.e. ordinary workers couldn't bring up a stream on their desktop) then it's not really any different to using a coax/amp system to pump the TV signal around the building, which would be perfectly legal...

[mick70]

Thanks for all your feedback.:)

[zoombini]

And don't forget your TV license too. :)

[altis]

And if you are 'Micro$oft Averse' then you could also check out VideoLAN which is and Open Software project to do this very thing:

http://www.videolan.org/