Summit to scope out PTV’s education role
Vendors offer teacher-friendly chunks of video on demand

Originally published in Current, July 14, 2003
By Steve Behrens

With hopes that they can sort out what services public TV can best perform in formal education, more than 50 stations will send leaders to the National Educational Leadership Summit next week in Tucson, Ariz.

The topic is a timely one for the many stations that have pledged DTV transmission capacity to education and now must figure out how to make good on that promise.

“We’re saying we’re leaders in education,” says Skip Hinton, president of the National Educational Telecommunications Association, sponsor of the meeting. “[Public television wants] to take a leadership role. We need help in defining in a common language what it means to be a leader. What do we have to do to be identified that way by educators, those who we’re serving?”

Digital packages compete

Many stations have expected to answer those questions by returning to the distribution of classroom video to schools—an early function of public TV that disappeared from many stations in recent years. Instead of using an entire broadcast channel, however, the stations anticipate using only a fraction of their off-hours DTV capacity.

KERA, Dallas, will unveil plans during the conference for a DTV datacasting package, including both technology and classroom content, according to station President Gary Ferrell. A for-profit spinoff of KERA will offer the package, he said.

The datacasting service is one of five packages of elementary/ secondary-school video-on-demand programming, each with a different digital delivery system, that will be discussed at the Tucson meeting:

• Digital Broadcast Network, KERA’s new service for kindergarten through 12th grade, is listed under NETA’s name on the screening schedule. Delivery system: broadcast over public TV stations’ digital signals to update video collections on tuner-equipped servers in schools.
• Chalkwaves Plug & Play Digital Collection is being offered by 11 distributors of school TV, based on the 6,000-clip selection of secondary-school material used in public TV’s regional Chalkwaves service in Missouri, Illinois and Kansas. Delivery system: hard drives containing digitized material are shipped to schools and installed in their internal networks for distribution of video clips to classrooms.
• Unitedstreaming is offered through a deal with OnCourse, a public TV initiative that began developing a similar online service. When OnCourse ran out of money to start its own service, it contracted with Illinois-based United Learning to offer Unitedstreaming through public TV stations [March 2003 article]. The service, launched in 2001 and already allied with some public TV stations, won’t have a presentation during the formal screenings, but it is expected to be discussed during the summit, according to NETA. Delivery system: streaming or downloading over the Internet. Website: www.unitedstreaming.com.
• DigitalCurriculum, with 1,230 chunked video clips for K-12 students, is offered by AIMS Multimedia, a California-based competitor of Unitedstreaming. The collection comes with an index of 4,560 curricular concepts and 7,770 online quiz questions. Delivery system: streaming or downloading over the Internet. Website: www.digitalcurriculum.com.
• A new digital content service from Agency for Instructional Technology, not yet named, will offer 2,000 K-12 titles by January. The partnership with Magic Lantern, a Canadian instructional media distributor, already offers a service called InSite in Canada. Delivery system: Internet streaming.
• TVOntario is offering the Curriculum Resource Bank, announced at last year’s FirstView screening. The service, developed with Education Network of Ontario, so far has one American buyer and no Canadian, according to TVO sales exec Beth Stafford. Delivery system: streaming. Website: www.curriculumresourcebank.com.

Many of the instructional media distributors are offering their products through more than one delivery platform. AIT not only offers its own service but is part of the Chalkwaves Plug & Play consortium. Nebraska ETV is active in OnCourse and also a participant in ChalkWaves Plug & Play. Another distributor, ITS, is offering content through KERA’s datacast platform, Chalkwaves and AIMS’s streaming service.

The program providers wouldn’t be doing their job if they didn’t offer material through various delivery systems, says AIT’s Joann Flick, because school systems have such varied needs. Some have poor Internet connections and can’t use streaming; others will be too far from public TV stations to use datacasting, she says.

While the services now typically include both a delivery technology and a selection of instructional videos, Flick believes the package deal is just a transitional phenomenon. After educators make the jump to chunked digital video she expects they will select a preferred technology and return to making their own choice of instructional clips.

Hinton expects the services will compete on program content as well, with some offering the best materials from various producers on an exclusive basis and others offering greater variety.

Will this be LastView?

If advocates of the new digital content services have an accurate view of the future, the extensive libraries of bite-size “chunked” videos, keyed to state curriculum plans, will replace much of the present classroom video market, which typically sells video in topical series of 20-minute programs.
That would affect public TV’s annual classroom video market, which usually begins every summer with NETA’s FirstView screenings. This year, NETA dropped the FirstView name while tagging the screenings onto the end of next week’s summit. [A catalog of programs was printed in Current, July 14.]

The annual screenings have been declining for several years as schools divert money from video to computers and fewer producers venture to offer programs. The recession, meanwhile, has threatened to turn FirstView into LastView, further reducing funding for classroom video while cutting travel budgets that bring buyers to the NETA screenings.

This year’s screening attracted 88 series entries, down from 114 last year and a peak of 157 in 2000, according to NETA. The number of public TV stations and other program buyers has fallen from more than 100 to about 40 last year and about 30 this year. Spending by NETA-member stations at the end of the annual purchase process also has declined from a peak of about $3.7 million to $3.1 million in fiscal 2002 and $2.65 million last year.

“We don’t think we can assure that we can do [the screening] in the same raised-tent format next year or in subsequent years,” Hinton says. NETA is considering whether more of the screenings can be done through the Internet or other means. Another option for 2004 is combining with the nonprofit National Media Market, an independent instructional screening every fall that features much of the same programming.

For this year, the crowd will be swelled somewhat by NETA’s Educational Leadership Summit, which brings 51 chief execs from stations and more than 60 education directors, Hinton said.

It may be the first major meeting that brings together general managers and education directors, and Hinton sees special value in that. “Honestly, I think it’s going to be very useful for education directors to hear what managers say, and vice versa,” he says.

Likewise, he expects participants will benefit from hearing from both the stations that have big commitments to formal education and those that are involved only in Ready to Learn services for preschoolers. Classroom video distributors and producers, on hand for the screenings, will also add their perspective to conversations.

The missing players, he says, are the educators themselves. He hopes to bring them into discussions in the future.

Posted Sept. 15, 2003
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