Is our bandwidth used when users view embedded items?

Is our bandwidth used when users view embedded items?

by Patrick G -
Number of replies: 4
Some students create videos and need to present those videos as part of their portfolio of work. We ask students to post their videos to You Tube or Google Video or Teacher Tube so that they don't use up file storage space on our servers, and so that they share their work more broadly than just our site.

What I'm confused about now is whether to let students embed their videos in their portfolios, or to ask them to just post a link to the video.

My question is whether our bandwidth is used when someone watches a video embedded in a page on our site.

Note that this question also relates to embedded documents from Scribd.com and embedded slideshows from SlideShare.net.
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In reply to Patrick G

Re: Is our bandwidth used when users view embedded items?

by Mark Hilliard -
Patrick,
If you think about where the video resource is and where your users are accessing Moodle resources you can answer your own question.

If the video is on YOUR school server (in your network LAN) it will use bandwidth once on each video upload and of course more of your bandwidth on EVERY download from outside because they still go to your computer.

If the video lives on YouTube but your users are accessing it from outside the district it should not load your school network, but if your users are accessing it during the day from school computers, then you will still incur the bandwidth consumption if students get it off YouTube, but have to bring it over your bandwidth into the school.

mark
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In reply to Mark Hilliard

Re: Is our bandwidth used when users view embedded items?

by Patrick G -
Mark, thanks for the answers!

I didn't make my situation clear enough to get the answer I'm really after, so here are some details:
  • we don't have a campus, everyone accesses our Moodle from their own computer using their own internet connection
  • users upload the video to YouTube, then use the EMBED HTML tag to put their video in a page on our Moodle
So, when a user at home watches a video embedded in our page, is the video stream routed from YouTube through our servers to their computer, thus using our bandwidth? (We have monthly bandwidth limits, so we need to know which activities use our bandwidth.)

thanks in advance for your help,
Patrick
In reply to Patrick G

Re: Is our bandwidth used when users view embedded items?

by Steve Hyndman -

No...it's not being served from your server, so it doesn't use your bandwidth. You are simply providing a "window" for the movie to be served from YouTube. It's sort of like looking at the sunset from your kitchen window...you can see it and enjoy it from your house, but it's not in your house and doesn't burn it down smile

Steve

Average of ratings: Useful (2)