RealEyes Media

More than 40,000 students use A Beka Academy’s home school curriculum each year.  This stalwart of distance learning for primary and secondary education has traditionally delivered its video-based instruction to students using physical media, a costly and time consuming process.

A Beka Academy engaged RealEyes Media to create a digital process to augment their traditional delivery model.  The resulting project used the spectrum of Adobe tools to yield both an automated process to encode, encrypt, and transfer more than 14,000 hours of video to a CDN as well as a consumer application that students will use to view assigned classroom video content.

The automated encoding process was designed to empower A Beka Academy to process and deploy new video content without dependence on an external vendor.

The consumer application’s purpose is to allow for secure, on-demand access of high-quality video lessons to each student while strictly enforcing business rules and safeguarding intellectual property. Two versions of the consumer application were created to meet the school’s needs fully.  A Flash, browser-based version allows students to view assigned streaming video lessons by day or by subject.  The AIR desktop version extends these capabilities, allowing students to download DRM-protected files for offline viewing.

Challenge

In addition to providing a convenient, new delivery option for families using A Beka Academy curriculum, and realizing considerable ROI over time, the school undertook this project to meet the challenge of adequately enforcing its business rules.  For example, the consumer application implements complex view rules based upon an individual student’s academic program, and enrollment status.  This was not possible with the physical media delivery model.  Furthermore, the school desired to enact more stringent control over its intellectual property to reduce or eliminate unauthorized use. DRM protection and SWF validation met this need.

This project also addressed other significant development challenges.  These include:

• Thousands of hours of source video content needed to be captured from original physical media, encoded into H.264 format, secured with DRM protection, and deployed to a CDN.

• Families using the school’s curriculum are geographically diverse, with extreme variances in connection speeds, hardware performance, and technical knowledge.

• Instant access to streaming files was desired; however, it was also critical that students have the ability to view lessons when an internet connection was not available.  Also, the ability to send the entire library of lessons via fixed media was desired to accommodate remote A Beka Academy schools.

Benefits

The school’s physical media delivery model required that three shipments of DVDs were sent to each student, and then returned to the school.  There is considerable financial cost to this process including shipping, media, processing, and replacement of lost/damaged disks.

Providing these files as h.264 Flash Video files for streaming and DRM-protected download access via a CDN is significantly less expensive per-student than the traditional physical delivery model.  Additionally, as more students adopt this digital delivery method, there is an economy of scale as origin storage costs are distributed among a larger student base.