ABC-Net Digital Media

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While educational digital media content is easily available, few schools are using the new technology at their site - and for several good reasons:

LAN bandwidth - current Ethernet networks can't handle multiple streams of quality full-screen digital video.
Content identity - there is no standard technology for identifying or cataloging digital video files as there is for MP3 audio files.
Playback costs - current digital media servers for centralized playback cost thousands of dollars, and aren't designed for instructor control.

However, thanks to a partnership with D-Link, those barriers don't exist for schools equipped with Contemporary Research's ABC-Net Media Network. In ABC-Net sites, educators can seamlessly access and control both analog and digital media - at a very low per-classroom cost.

Here's how the solution works:

File Server. Digital media files are stored in an ordinary PC or file server at the school. The district media staff can name, store, and manage files from a central location.
D-Link Digital Media Players. One or more players can play back digital video, photo, and audio files. The inexpensive players make it a snap to provide digital content, accessed from user-friendly on-screen menus.
RF Modulators. AV from each player is fed to an RF modulator for broadcast to classrooms as a TV channel. Playback does not impact the school computer network.
Media Networking. ABC-Net links the classroom TV to both analog and digital media players. Teachers can select and control both with an ordinary IR remote or ABC-Web browser pages.

The best news is that the D-Link Media Players offer a more flexible solution for media playback. Conventional video servers handle only a narrow range of MPEG movie formats. The newest D-Link unit can playback movies in AVI, MPEG 1, 2, and 4, Xvid, and WMV formats, audio files in MP3, WAV, and WMA formats, as well as photos in JPEG, JPEG2000, BMP, PNG, TIFF, and GIF formats.