Boeing, Streaming in Seattle

Boeing is a large streamer, but no one really knows how much video is being produced or how much streaming is being done across its intranet and extranet. That's because Boeing allows its operating groups, business units and individual employees considerable autonomy in posting to the company's intranet. As a result, it has almost 6 million Web pages.

There is also no central authority to monitor audio and video production or streaming throughout the company, and each business unit within each of Boeing's major operating groups manages its own servers, and contracts for the production of its own media. For example, when the sales and marketing team for the 717 aircraft wants a video to show buyers at Avianca, they typically turn to Boeing's Video Services or Digital Design Group in Seattle. Similarly, when the Sea Launch group wants video of its deployment — for streaming or any other use - they typically hire the Video Services Group in Southern California. Some of Boeing's media production is even contracted outside the company.

Each of Boeing's major locations — Seattle, Southern California, St. Louis, Wichita, Philadelphia and Huntsville, AL — hosts its own video services unit, with the largest based near corporate headquarters in Seattle. The Seattle group alone turns out 400 to 500 productions per year, with budgets ranging from a few hundred to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Frank Buck, writer/producer for the Seattle Video Services Group, notes, "In the [Seattle] Video Services Group, we have about 35 people, including 16 writer/producers, five camera staff and two editors. On any given day, there are four or five crews [in the Seattle area] shooting on productions. Then you have productions going on in St. Louis, California, and other sites as well."

From a small television studio in the corporate headquarters building, Boeing's senior executives give interviews to visiting reporters, and deliver earnings reports and addresses to the employees. The Seattle Video Services Group produces these single-camera events, and will soon install a computer on-site - with editing, video capture (Osprey-500) and encoding capabilities — to enable the rapid posting of streaming audio and video onto the corporate intranet. David Weitz, senior manager of Boeing's Communication Web Team, notes, "We're getting a greater demand for speed. When Phil Condit goes on the BBC, or when we have a first flight, we're seeing a lot more demand for Frank to shoot it, edit it, and have it up on the Web in the next hour. We learned from our last survey that when employees drive home and they hear something on radio or TV, they want to have heard it from the company first."

A separate facility in Seattle houses a larger stage (used for multiple-camera productions), a control room, five Avid and Media 100 non-linear edit suites, an on-line edit bay, an extensive media archive, and the Video Services Group's offices. Since most productions are now shot in the field, the large studio is used infrequently. The same is true for the on-line edit bay, since most editors and producers now finish in the non-linear edit suites.

The current video standard is DVCPRO (it was formerly BetacamSP). The control room houses DVCPRO and BetacamSP source decks; a Grass Valley 200 switcher; a Grass Valley BPE251 editor; a Graham-Patten audio mixer; an Abacus DVE; and a Quantel still-store. Separate, smaller editing facilities are also located at some of Boeing's larger divisions, such as the commercial airplanes manufacturing facility in Everett, WA. Each Video Services Group around the country is independent, and each makes its own equipment purchasing decisions.

The Seattle group's most recent purchase is an e-Studio 7811 portable webcast/production package. Doug Peterson, producer/director in the Seattle Video Services Group, says, "It's a complete turnkey system, and it's all portable. And we're not limited to where we can get into the fiber network. With this, we can originate and stream from any place in the company where we have an Internet connection. It also has the capability to automatically archive the [encoded] program. As soon as we've faded to black, it's ready to be accessed again as Real Media, Windows Media or whatever."

The Seattle Duplication Group encodes video into streaming media files and maintains an extensive media archive. An even larger media archive, with film footage dating back to the beginnings of Boeing and McDonnell Douglas, is maintained by the Media Services Group in St. Louis. Boeing is using WebWare and Virage's VideoLogger to index its nearly 4 million hours of film and video footage.

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