SURFnet and Stichting Kennisnet expand video platform horizons by going open-source

Utrecht, Netherlands, 25 June 2009 – SURFnet, a leading provider of IT
services for education and research, and Stichting Kennisnet, the Dutch
educational IT support organisation, today announced enhancements to
their joint video management and distribution platform. The platform,
called MediaMosa, delivers rich media content to the Dutch educational
sector, is now available to open source developers worldwide.

As video has become more popular as a knowledge transfer tool within the
education landscape, SURFnet and Stichting Kennisnet have played a
significant role in making it available to teachers and students. Due in
part to SURFnet’s high-speed broadband network, teachers in higher
education institutions can now easily integrate high-quality video into
their lectures and classes. For example, Dutch Higher Education
organisations add proprietary material to an online video library called
SURFmedia, which offers the possibility of storing high-definition video
content and shielding it from defined groups of viewers where necessary.

Stichting Kennisnet is also a strong proponent of the use of digital
image material in primary and secondary education. It is the driving
technical force behind initiatives such as Teleblik.nl, a website for
the educational sector where both students and teachers can search for
and view audiovisual content.

MediaMosa is a robust, flexible and highly scalable media management
platform. It is already helping deliver rich content to educational
organisations across the Netherlands, but SURFnet and Stichting
Kennisnet are also seeing interest from companies outside the industry
and the country. By making MediaMosa open source and enabling developers
across the world to build new applications for it, they hope to make an
even greater contribution to the generation of exciting multimedia
applications.

SURFnet and Stichting Kennisnet have jointly developed MediaMosa to
provide the underlying system that handles the management, storage,
indexing and playing of video material to make these types of
applications possible. It is based on the Drupal content management
system and was designed on the basis of Representational State Transfer
(REST) architecture principles.

MediaMosa will be made available as an open source application through
www.mediamosa.org. This means that any organisation wishing to develop
its own video portal can leverage the joint expertise built up by
SURFnet and Stichting Kennisnet. Users can also integrate streaming
video into a proprietary website, intranet or collaborative environment.
MediaMosa also supports links with existing applications.

MediaMosa was developed within the framework of the SURFnet/Kennisnet
Innovation Programme, which receives financial backing from the Dutch
Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

About SURFnet
SURFnet is the National Research & Education Network (NREN) organisation
in The Netherlands. SURFnet develops and provides innovative services
for education and research in the field of network infrastructure,
authentication and authorisation and on-line multimedia collaboration
services. Every day SURFnet provides access to these services to over
one million users in higher education and research.

SURFnet is part of SURF, the collaborative organisation for higher
education institutions and research institutes which are together
working on breakthrough innovations in ICT. For more than 20 year
SURFnet has been one of the world’s leading research network operators.
More information can be found at: www.surfnet.nl/info/en/

About Stichting Kennisnet
Stichting Kennisnet is the public IT support organisation of, for and by
the Dutch educational sector. The foundation promotes the interests of
the Dutch educational sector in IT, makes resources available supporting
the selection process for IT products and services, and provides
educational services innovating in the learning process. Stichting
Kennisnet is also an expertise centre for IT and education.

Links:
www.mediamosa.org