QCShow Player
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Create Your Own Presentations
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Examples
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Technical Notes
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Support
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The Philosophy of QCShow
QCShow was designed to create and distribute superior quality
lectures worldwide at very low costs, not only in terms of money, but in
time, bother and bandwidth as well.
Internet technologies possess obvious promise for the dissemination of
instructional material over very large distances and into remote corners
of the world. Unfortunately, their impact thus far has been minimal and
have not lived up to expectations.
That lack of acceptance has been due to two factors:
- the cumbersomeness and high-bandwidth requirements of the
current protocols
- the difficulty in easily creating content by a single lecturer,
sitting alone in his or her office.
The keys to a process's being a success lie in it being simple, easy and
cheap – especially if the end result is quite excellent.
To this end, we have has created two products, QCShow,
a freely-downloadable player, and QCShow Author, an inexpensive
content authoring tool. The criteria that permeate the QCShow
design are:
- Simplicity in design and use
- Highest possible quality presentation
- Extremely low costs, in content preparation and delivery.
Because of these attributes, QCShow may have a significant impact
on the nature and methods of the distribution of information. This will
be especially true in those areas where information tends to be
especially dense, such as the lectures associated with upper-level
high-school through graduate school, continuing professional educational
courses, and in technical commercial sales and training presentations.
QCShow compares very favorably with satellite television
transmissions; indeed, many have commented that it provides a higher
quality mechanism for the transmission of lectures worldwide than does
television, yet at an enormously reduced cost, perhaps one thousand
times less.
The Intended Audience
QCShow was designed for those processes that are commonly
associated with higher level class lectures, plenary talks at scientific
meetings, continuing professional education, technical training, and
sales. We are especially interested in scientist-to-scientist
communications.
But the value of QCShow extends far beyond traditional academic
uses. The major commercial markets for QCShow
will lie in the demand for internal training, corporate policy
disseminations, and product use lectures. Indeed, the requirement for
developing internal training procedures is among the most pressing that
most organizations face. In the end, there is very little difference in
the educational processes used at Harvard and Home Depot University. A
lecture regarding the installation of Pergo flooring is conducted in
exactly the same manner as one on differing geological flooring
mechanisms, and both, with very little effort, can be made entertaining
and intellectually exciting.
The Design Criteria
The criteria for the two products were:
QCShow Player
- The presentation must be capable of operating under continuous play
conditions, without unnecessary interruption, at telephone modem speeds,
delivered without any form of degradation in the realized presentation,
anywhere in the world.
- The playback should be exceptionally good looking and possess
high-quality sound.
- The playback should be capable of being paused, repeated, or stepped
through at high speed, as often as the listener wishes.
- Initial wait times before the presentation begins should be made minimal.
QCShow Author
- The effort expended by author in creating a narrated slide show
should be no more than 10% greater than the effort that the author would
have expended in the creation and delivery of his PowerPoint
slides. Keeping the cost of the construction of the deliverable lectures
to an absolute minimum (measured primarily in time and bother) is of
paramount concern.
- No other equipment than that found in a normal, sound-capable
Windows-based PC should be necessary for the creation of
the wide-area, internet-based lectures.
The Importance of Low-bandwidth Delivery
Bandwidth is like money. If you have more than you need, you never think
about it. But if you don't, it's all that you think about. 150 million
people in the United States are estimated to have internet access, but
in early 2005 only 26.4 million of those have broadband access (16.7
million cable subscribers; 10.6 million for DSL).
This leaves 80% of the population of the United States unable to readily
utilize any internet technology that requires a bandwidth much greater
than approximately 45 kbps. While this percentage will drop over time,
and at some future time may even drop precipitously, there will always
be a – perhaps large – population that will be stuck at telephone modem
speeds. But the United States is not the only intended audience for
QCShow. We want QCShow to work as well in villages in
Bangladesh and Burma as it does in Boston. While the QCShow
protocol was designed to work only better at higher bandwidths and with
faster computers, the primary emphasis underlying its design remains
for it to work well at telephone modem speeds and on slow PCs.
But there are two other overriding reasons for low-bandwidth designs
however. They are:
- server bandwidth
- lecture file size.
Server bandwidth limitations are an often underestimated problem. In
1999, MIT announced that they were going to put all their coursework
onto the internet, but in their early trials, MIT quickly discovered
that 15 simultaneous streams would "crash their network."
The second great attribute of low-bandwidth encodings is that they imply
small file sizes, both on the server and in the client.
Because of the high compression levels used in QCShow, the file
sizes associated with QCShow
lectures tend to be quite small. A 45-minute classroom lecture
generally consumes about 10 MB, thus a standard 39-session college
semester class will require only slightly more than half a CD to store.
Perhaps even more interesting, all of the core lectures for an entire
four-year college education could be stored onto a single DVD.
These small file sizes also allow – in areas of the world where internet
connections are not readily available – large libraries of
QCShow-formatted lectures to be distributed on CDs or DVDs
very inexpensively.
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