During the University of Victoria’s Spring Convocation ceremonies, 3,649 graduands in caps and gowns crossed the stage in the University Centre Farquhar Auditorium to receive their degrees, diplomas and certificates; and Shelagh Rogers formally became our 11th chancellor.
All of the Convocation ceremonies were webcast live by University Systems for families and friends from around the world to watch. Each video of the webcast was then also posted online for on-demand viewing within 15 minutes of the end of each ceremony and updated with a higher-quality version the next day.
This graph represents global viewers who watched the June 2015 convocation webcasts:
Our students come from countries around the world. Delivering a live webcast to a global audience requires much more bandwidth and access than a UVic-hosted streaming server can reliably provide. For most webcasting we perform, our UVic streaming server works great, but for the larger audiences that Convocation draws, we rely on Akamai’s global content delivery network.
Akamai has the advantage of a world-wide network of caching servers that distribute our webcast stream locally. When a user requests the stream from our UVic webpage, that request is sent to Akamai, who redirects the request to the closest content server which can stream with less packet loss and interruption than we could from campus.
Our most-viewed ceremony this spring convocation was on June 8th, when Shelagh Rogers was installed as the University of Victoria’s chancellor. We had 229 concurrent viewers at our peak, with viewers from as far away as Japan, Saudi Arabia and Cambodia. Other ceremonies peaked at between 93 to 157 viewers.
