CityTV -- The Campus TV Service

CityTV - The Campus TV Service

K Y Chow

city_tv.gif (4364 bytes)

CityTV, a new service provided by the Computing Services Centre for viewing of TV programmes, is available now. The service is part of the VideoNet that offers video services for users within our campus. At the moment, there are five Cable TV channels available:

1. BBC	4. Cable News
2. CNBC Asia	5. Discovery Channel
3. CNN

In addition to these five channels, another channel is reserved for broadcasting campus events.

How does it work

The diagram below shows various components of the whole system. Cable TV provides the TV signals for five channels. The signal of each channel is decoded using the decoder provided by Cable TV. Each decoder is connected to a PC capturing station, which is equipped with an Intel capture card and Microsoft Netshow Encoder software. The capture station captures the video signal and encodes it into Microsoft’s Advanced Streaming Format (ASF). The encoded stream is then fed to the Netshow Server. To utilise the multicasting technology in minimising the demand on bandwidth, CityTV service and its associated network devices on the Video Network are multicast enabled.

city_tv1.GIF (4269 bytes)

How to use the service

To use the service, you simply choose the VideoNet option in our Intranet Web page. If you select CityTV for the first time, Microsoft Windows Media Player will be installed on your PC unless the software is already there. After the installation, restart the Web browser software, Netscape Communicator, and follow the VideoNet menu again to start the Player for CityTV. The following diagram shows the CityTV homepage.

city_tv_channel.JPG (109874 bytes)

For ease of use and flexibility, you may take the remote control unit located at the bottom of the page for switching between channels. If you encounter difficulties using the service, please contact our Help Desk at ext. 7658.

Computing Services Centre
City University of Hong Kong
ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk