CERN's live webcasts

You may well have noticed when watching the seminar on 4 July that the CERN webcast site has had a makeover.

The new-look site went live on 26 June and provides a detailed schedule of upcoming webcasts as well as easy access to those of recent events.  It is fully compatible with Smartphones and tablets - which wasn't the case until now – and enables viewers to see both the speaker and the presentation, thanks to two separate video recordings.

Another innovation: permanent webcasts. In a single click, you can access and view all the channels run by the ATLAS collaboration, including Public Outreach channel, Technical channel and Public Development channel.  

And if you want to add your own event to the schedule and broadcast it live via the web,  just go to this address. You can also restrict access to your webcasts to a pre-defined audience.

Behind the scenes, the webcast service has also been busy modernising its infrastructure: the Flash Media Server has been replaced by the streaming software Wowza, and a set of virtual servers provides flexible support for CERN's evolving needs. The standard internal service capacity now stands at 6,000 simultaneous clients.

For special events like the Higgs seminar on 4 July, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) such as Limelight and GroovyGecko are used, which specialise in streaming events on a large scale.

by IT Department