St. Mary’s University, the oldest Catholic university in the U.S. Southwest, is no stranger to livestreaming their commencements to protect their community from disease. They first started doing live broadcasts of their graduation ceremonies back during swine flu. Get their thoughts!
Transcript:
For our commencements, I go back and say, for our small institute, one of the first times we streamed a broadcast to parents and grandparents of our commencement event was several many years ago when we had unfortunately the swine flu that hit institutions, the world, basically. And so we didn’t want to – not that streaming was new at that point in time. But it was a family affair, you came to this institute’s graduation ceremony – and so that kind of moment, of not a great moment in time turned us really into “It’s a given.” We’re going to stream every which way.
We began flipping to Kaltura to do solid streaming, good broadcast, pass along the flavors that we saw fit. To let it still be multi-bandwidth and variable bitrate, and it’s been solid every time.
We use it additionally for the campus events that happen – convocations, commencements, other major major events.
I remember this last December graduation, we used Kaltura (of course). I turned off every service but Kaltura’s stream and said “what did you think of the quality?” and everybody’s like “I can’t believe that that’s…that’s our little Kaltura?” The answer is yes, our little Kaltura could do national level broadcasting and it certainly comes into a big benefit for us.
We really needed that platform that was just easy that was, again, strong. We were looking for the platform. And that’s what Kaltura was to us. It wasn’t just an instructional classroom gadget, it wasn’t a camera for lecture capture only, it was really a platform first, to be able to hold multiple kinds of video for any kind of learning and instruction.
