Church Internet Broadcast

A very unusual event bringing together religion and the latest information and communication technologies took place at the Church of Holy Trinity, Královo Pole, Brno, on Sunday, 26 June 2005. Experts from the Faculty of Information Technologies of the Brno University of Technology were engaged in a project organised by CESNET and focusing on an Internet broadcast of the first church service of Mgr. Ing. Jan Zachoval, CSc. Because the number of people interested in the service of this graduate of the Technical University of Brno was very high, the broadcast was expected to attract a considerable attention. The Church of the Holy Trinity has a very strategic position as it is located right next to the former Carthusian monastery now owned by the Faculty of Information Technologies. Both buildings were interconnected by extensive network cabling, enabling the technicians to establish two independent lines for the transmission. Having placed a camera unobtrusively on the gallery next to the choir, they used an MPEG-2 encoder allowing to send one stream to three auditoriums of the Faculty using DVD-quality video distribution. The other stream was then used for recording the service and multicasting to other parts of the Faculty. About 250 people watched the broadcast in the Faculty's lecture rooms.

The transmission itself was smooth and did not suffer from any problems and the quality of both picture and sound was very good. Prior to the transmission, the technicians had to resolve certain minor problems though, e. g. due to the Church's wooden floor, any movement of the choir members had a negative effect on the camera stand. The recording is now available on DVD that can be played on both PC and standard commercial DVD players.

For more information on the broadcast, visit http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~skokana/primice/text-html/primice.html

The CESNET association was established by universities and the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. It is currently financed by the government Council for Research and Development and by its members. The association performs research and development on information and communication technology and is building and developing the CESNET2 national gigabyte optical network for science, research, development and education. Thanks to its research activities and the results it has achieved, the CESNET association is the Czech Republic's representative in the project for the construction of the Pan-European GEANT2 network and is actively contributing to its implementation. The CESNET association is currently involved - inter alia - in the use of high-speed networks for multimedia data sharing purposes in both synchronous (video conferences and shared applications) and asynchronous (streaming) form.