In recent years, Occidental College has seen an increasing demand from its student body for cable TV in residence hall rooms, but providing the service was seen as a financial challenge given that we didn’t have a coaxial cable plant, and because of the personnel and overhead costs that would be associated with loaning cable boxes to students. Thus we were very intrigued by the possibility of using our existing high-speed network to deliver cable TV. Fortunately, our residence hall network switches had recently been upgraded, so we had both the bandwidth and the multicasting ability required to deliver high-quality digital video over the network. When we evaluated vendors that could supply the technology, we were impressed with Video Furnace’s elegant client. It is a powerful tool with an intuitive interface – it would be easy for students to find the TV channels – and it requires little documentation or support from our systems group. The Video Furnace personnel not only were knowledgeable but they also related immediately to the particular constraints of delivering the service in a college environment. When we were unable to get our local cable provider to work with digital delivery from any vendor, Video Furnace steered us to a third-party vendor, Falls Earth Station, which provided an almost turnkey solution for delivering satellite TV to our Video Furnace encoders at a remarkably affordable price.

We certainly will be delivering digital video for academic purposes in the near future, and we have found that, here too, the Video Furnace platform seems more elegant and easier to adapt to the institution’s particular needs than other vendors’ products. The Video Furnace system interfaces easily with our authentication system and allows us to easily specify which users have access to each piece of video content.

With the excellent service from Falls Earth Station and Video Furnace, the installation of our service went without any significant problems. In less than two months we installed the cable TV antennas, cable boxes, encoders and authentication server, did testing, and began service to our students. We have finished the semester with only a handful of service calls – all of which were resolved quickly and easily.

Thomas A. Slobko
Chief Information Officer
Occidental College
May 2006

"The Video Furnace solution lets you manage and distribute digital, TV-quality video in the form of live TV channels, prerecorded, scheduled and VOD content over the IP infrastructure to the PC. This allows video to be used for real business reasons as opposed to entertainment purposes, like most people think of with other IPTV solutions. "

Alecia R. Williams
Sr. Director of Business Development and Sr. Solution Architect
Alcatel USA
May 2006

“It's not every day that President Bush visits your high school. So we wanted to find a way to let everyone watch his speech on their computers...Video Furnace couldn't have been easier to work with, and their system couldn't have been easier to set up and use. We are enormously pleased with the entire experience.”

Kevin McNamara,
director of technology,
Canandaigua City School District
May 2006

" Video Furnace has been committed not only to bringing video to the desktops of more than 4,200 users across our campus, but also to evolving the service as our needs have evolved.

When we deployed the service in 2002, colleagues on campus, students and faculty we talked to couldn’t believe we were able to provide this technology. Now, our conversations have shifted to discussions of how we would like to see the service evolve. This shift—from affirming that the technology really does work to envisioning what new and exciting things it can do—is a testament to Video Furnace’s technical capabilities and vision for desktop video.

In addition, Video Furnace has been able to quickly address any issues or concerns we’ve had. They have an exceptional support team."

Dave Carr,
Director of Telecommunications and Network Service,
Northwestern University
May 2006

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