Staff Editorial | Slow streaming video frustrates campus Internet users

If you returned to campus on Tuesday, Jan. 23 and tried to watch the State of the Union address on the White House Web site, you may have found yourself out of luck. In fact, if you have ever tried to watch any Internet videos on campus, you might have discovered that they didn’t stream so smoothly either.

The College currently limits the amount of bandwidth that students can use, such that generally only 40 videos can be streamed at a time. If you happen to be the 41st user, this means that your video streams will likely load slowly, freeze frequently, and buffer constantly. Add that to the glacial pace of the new wireless network, and it seems that the Internet services that Vassar offers to its students are falling far behind students’ needs.

Recently, CBS News announced that it was considering options to stream broadcasts of the CBS Nightly News online, hoping to improve ratings by using the Internet to reach younger viewers. While most nightly news broadcasts are clearly aimed toward an older audience (as the inundation of pharmaceutical company ads implies), CBS has decided to try to increase its appeal to a younger audience by using a more cutting-edge approach. This is a development in the path of more interactive technology, as news companies and political groups alike are increasingly using video blogs to reach their consumers and constituencies.

Since the College does not provide cable in dorm rooms or apartments, Internet broadcasts would be a useful way for students to stay informed about current events. Although there are televisions with cable in dorm multi-purpose rooms, it can be difficult to gain control of a TV unless the rest of the dorm wants to watch the same program at the same time as you. A student who wants to catch a brief news update for 15 minutes in their dorm MPR will likely have a difficult time doing so if their free chunk of time overlaps with Lost. But if the College bandwidth were sufficiently equipped to play video, the Internet could provide an outlet for students who might make different choices about what to watch.

Although some students might use this technology to watch the latest YouTube video of an angsty teenager strumming her guitar or a python regurgitating a baby hippo, there are plenty of students who would take the opportunity to use it as a means for acquiring information. In addition, the ability to stream videos could open up possibilities for classroom use as well. Perhaps “Angsty Teenagers and the Guitar: A Study” wouldn’t make for a very good research paper, but “Personal Videos and the U.S. Military: How New Media is Shaping Americans’ Perceptions of War” certainly would.

What the College might consider doing is limiting individual bandwidth for video-streaming use rather than capping the bandwidth on a campus-wide basis. At other colleges and universities (such as Duke, SUNY Binghamton, and Kent State) bandwidth is capped so that each student has the same ability to watch streaming videos. Furthermore, these schools found that the culprits responsible for grinding the network to a halt were generally the three percent of all users who were sharing music, movies and software on peer-to-peer networks, which made them responsible for nearly 90 percent of the network’s traffic. Binghamton and Kent State therefore placed caps that only restricted the amount of data that students could send out, not the amount they could receive. Vassar similarly caps outgoing data but this is separate from incoming traffic, unlike other schools. Under an individually-based system, students who want to watch a significant historic moment such as a State of the Union wouldn’t have to sacrifice their Internet capabilities simply because another student is sharing a 30-minute video of his snoring roommate.

We are a generation that has grown up in the Computer Age, and we are becoming evermore dependent upon information that can be accessed at our fingertips, and increasingly expectant that entire worlds are just a mouse-click away. The needs of Internet users are changing in accordance with this, and it is clearly necessary for the College to change to meet these everyday needs.

The Staff Editorial represents at least a two-thirds majority of the Editorial Board.