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High-Quality Video from ViewCast Makes
Signing Clear for Students at Texas School for the Deaf
The
Customer
Texas School for the Deaf, an Austin, Texas, school for the
hearing impaired.
The
Situation
More than 450 students attend the Texas School for the Deaf,
which is divided into two different college-like campuses
on the tree-covered hills of Austin, Texas. The school's east
campus serves infants and toddlers in its Early Childhood
Program, elementary age students through grade five, and special
needs students who have multiple disabilities. The south campus
serves middle school students, high school students, and transitional
students that have already graduated from high school. The
school not only provides a full range of direct educational
and support services, but also provides comprehensive diagnostic,
medical, social, sports and recreational services.
The
school needed a video-distribution system that could bridge
the two campuses so that classrooms, teachers and students
could share learning resources. They also wanted a system
that could provide distance-learning capabilities. A number
of companies could provide such a system - but the school
needed a solution that addressed an additional system requirement:
Clarity.
Because
the students and teachers at the school rely on sign language
to communicate, clarity of video, particularly where motion
was concerned, was extremely important. This requirement ruled
out the sometimes-choppy video of IP-based solutions.
The
Solution
ViewCast's multi-standard ViewPoint VBX - offering H.323 (video
over TCP/IP networks), MPEG-2, H.320 (video over ISDN), and
H.324 (video over standard telephone lines) capabilities -
is one of the most versatile solutions on the market. The
Viewpoint VBX is an enterprise-wide video
communication system, enabling desktops and conference rooms
to access a choice of video communication resources. It gives
companies a choice of video quality in a cost-effective manner.
The Viewpoint VBX system can be used for broadcast and closed
circuit television distribution, security, training, and video
conferencing.
The
ViewCast Viewpoint VBX system was a perfect solution for the
Texas School of the Deaf - except for one small complication.
The Texas School for the Deaf uses a Macintosh-based computer
system and ViewCast didn't have a Macintosh-based client.
Undeterred, the company's engineers quickly developed a system
that would work with the Macs.
"We
didn't have a Mac solution going in," said Brian Dean,
VP of Marketing at ViewCast. "But we're in the business
of providing solutions, so we quickly developed a Macintosh-based
product that met our customer's needs."
ViewCast
delivered and installed a Viewpoint VBX switcher with 25 clients
for each campus, conferences bridges and two codecs.
Soon,
students and teachers, using sign language, were able to communicate
with each other across campuses via high-quality video conferencing.
The
Future
As the Texas School for the Deaf expands its communications
infrastructure - the school is currently upgrading its T1
access and has plans to install ISDN lines for outbound video-enabled
calls - the scalable ViewCast Viewpoint VBX system is designed
to keep pace. The Viewpint VBX solution will enable the Texas
School for the Deaf to touch and enrich the lives of the hearing
impaired across the state and beyond.
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