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What IET.TV can offer students

Students shouldn’t miss out on IET.tv - especially it’s Research Seminar Channel – it’s the ultimate interactive video resource! 

IET.tv is the Institution’s webcasting service; an online offering where you can find video reports, presentations and even live broadcasts from all our events and conferences, anything from prestige lectures to Technical and Professional Network events, with circa. 2,000 presentations, there is something for everyone!

“When you visit IET.tv (www.iet.tv) , you immediately access a channel guide,” says Kim Letchford, IET.tv Account Manager at the IET. The channel guide presents you with four main channels:

  • IET News – about the IET and other newsworthy content
  • Technology – featuring eight sub-channels focusing on separate industry sectors
  • Research seminars – giving Universities a synchronised multi-media platform for research presentations
  • Corporate presentations – for companies to deliver their white papers and product messages.

“The news channel accommodates various types of content we produce; from documentaries to communication webcasts from our chief executive and secretary Robin McGill - these live webcasts are broadcast each month as a major communication to the membership to keep them updated with the latest IET news, developments or special themes. One of the themes we had for example, was really relevant to students; ‘Attracting and supporting students through to full membership’. This is available online now for people to go and watch.

“IET.tv is a great source of engineering and technology content. For example, you can view the webcast of Grady Booch from IBM talking about ‘The Promise, the Limits and the Beauty of Software’ and we’ve recently had Sir Tim Berners-Lee talking about the Web 2.0. There’s such exciting content there and a wealth of knowledge and expertise to tap into,” she enthuses.

The IET.tv player itself consists of two windows - a video window and a supporting media window, which can run anything from PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets to Flash footage or webpages.

A great feature of the platform itself is that you don’t have to feel the need to sit through up to an hours worth of event lecture. The technology we are using synchronises the video footage to the PowerPoint or supporting media across a timeline, which means that if you right click on the PowerPoint window you can pull up thumbnails of the entire PowerPoints in that presentation, and actually fast forward to that point in time in the video by clicking on the slide that holds your interest.

“So say you’re a research student, and you’re looking for something on semiconductors, you think a particular slide looks like it might contain information you need, select the slide and it will automatically fast forward to that point in time for you. This means you can just literally sit there and watch five minutes or so, instead of the whole hour, and vice versa, if you are halfway through the hour presentation, and you want to stop and go somewhere else then you can just catch it up another day,” Kim says.

There are many other channels available, however the one of most interest to student members is the Research Seminar Channel and we  have enabled universities to have the back end technology platform of IET.tv to generate their own webcast and actually showcase it in a dedicated channel on IET.tv. This is the IET’s first steps into user generated video content and initiatives like IET Faraday are also utilising the same platform to provide video upload competitions into schools.

The Research channel initiative provides Universities with the technology platform itself, free Real Producer encoding software and training giving them the ability to do on demand or live webcasting of their research, seminars, conferences or events that they’re hosting in the University.

“The Research channel uses a solution called IET.tv ‘in a box’ which is a cut down version of IET.tv, and it literally enables you to host your own webcast whilst synchronising this with your powerpoint slides, flash or video footage using just a laptop, internet connection and simple webcam,” explains Kim.

With live webcasting , the benefit of this IET.tv set up is that you can enable a chat forum environment below the player and viewers can join in and discuss questions or debate things in the forum which are actually going on live in the event itself and post questions to the speaker.

“The way Robin McGill uses this tool for his webcast communications is by having our members coming in and posting questions to him, so rather than having an audience in front of him in the room, the audience is actually online.  In addition, this means  they don’t have to physically travel to watch him speak, so carbon footprints are lowered, and because this is created as an on-demand presentation post the live event, people can watch this back anytime, anywhere.  All you need is an internet connection and real or windows media player. The fact that viewers can interact in real time with the speaker without travelling to the location is a powerful preposition,” notes Kim.

Many of the Universities which run IET accredited degrees are starting to take advantage of this resource, which has benefit to students and researchers.

“The IET.tv research channel enables Universities like Surrey to engage with much wider audiences than would be reached through a traditional presentation,” says a University of Surrey spokesperson.

“While we are becoming used to receiving digital content, such as podcasts, from mainstream broadcasters, IET.tv offers the opportunity for research groups within Universities to become content producers. This has significant potential for extending the dissemination and potential impact of research activities. Within a relatively short time, we were uploading our fully-digital presentation and providing supporting information and resources using the IET.tv system. Surrey's first presentation on the Research Channel, attracted commentary from an interested researcher from New Zealand the very next day. Distances and time-zones are general difficulties in international collaboration; IET.tv can bring researchers just that bit closer together.”

It’s a great resource for undergraduatess, postgraduatess and researchers, and for those who would like to become more ‘virtual’ in their education either by watching or holding lectures online. Find out more and try it out for yourself at

www.iet.tv.