Synergy Broadcast's Blog on Video in Education, Healthcare and Cable

Convert Cable TV to IPTV in K12

As school districts try to do more with less, one area of review is media, which includes the network and cable TV. The goal is to be able to provide teachers and students with access to all the media tools they need to engage students and be productive in the classroom, but save money or reduce complexity at the same time.

While many of today’s teachers grew up without the Internet, today’s students have no concept of life without the Internet. As a result they have an expectation that they should be taught using digital methods since they are digital natives.

However, using the latest technology is costly and often outpaces a districts ability to adapts. Examples include these digital migration issues:

1. Local Cable TV providers are migrating to HD and will stop sending analog signals over the cable. Many have already made the switch and only send digital. This means that every TV needs a cable set top box to be able to view any channel. If this has happened to your cable provider you already have closed circuit TV systems in your schools that are not functional.
2. Analog TV’s are no longer being made and the most popular replacement is the video projector. It connects to the classroom computer and provides the teacher with much more flexibility but it does not have a TV tuner.
3. As districts work to save money they are eliminating the RF or Cable system in new schools so there is no Cable TV signal available to the new schools.

These trends have districts looking at how to convert cable TV to IPTV to move cable to either the district network or each individual school’s network. Some advantages for doing this include:

1. Reduce the number of available TV channels to include only those with educational or newsworthy content.
2. Improve control without restricting teacher options.
3. Reduce infrastructure costs by eliminating the cable TV system.
4. Maximize network infrastructure by doing more with the network.
5. Eliminate classroom TV’s and move to projectors which are less costly.

How do you know if this makes sense for your school or district? Here are a few questions to ask:

1. Has your cable provider switched to digital or announced a time table for a switch?
2. Are your older schools having trouble keeping the cable TV system going?
3. Are you looking at replacing old, analog TV’s?
4. How many “education oriented” channels do you actually have on your cable system?

Converting Cable TV to IPTV is not as complex or costly as some would like you to think. The key is having an integrated software front-end that makes it easy to teachers and students to access “live TV” using a browser. In addition the solution should give you a migration path for video school announcements, encode and upload video as well as access video on demand for classroom use or as homework.

For more information please download our e-paper on Converting Cable TV to IPTV.

Related Articles:

My Cable Company Just Went Digital, Now What?

Benefits of Converting Cable TV to IPTV Streams in K-12

Tagged as: Analog Cable, cable TV conversion, convert cable TV to IPTV, Digital Cable, flipping the classroom, video in the classroom, Video On Demand

{ 0 comments }