Multi-University/Research Lectures

There are lots of lectures going on at Microsoft, both from people working there and researchers in universities. These talks are recorded and available internally. But I just discovered that Microsoft and some of these universities offer many recorded talks online publicly at the Multi-University/Research Lectures project.

I think this is a great project and invite you to check out some of the cool talks.

The videos are available in windows media streaming format only, but in various bitrates and some have time-compressed versions too (they don't sound as good though). Some also have synchronized slides in addition to the video, which is a good thing.

So far, I've watched two: Bruce Schneier on "The Three Truths of Computer Security" and Douglas Crockford on "Innovation and Conformity in a Microsoft World".

There are definitely resources, costs and scalability questions. Getting more content online is certainly not free (recording, editing and serving). But I hope that this project will continue to grow and that lectures will be more commonly recorded and made available.
I would be ready to pay a fee to have access to more talks from researchers. Maybe most lectures could be available for free with some bandwidth limitations (bitrate, number of simultaneous streams) while others would be available for early or priority access for subscribers.
Transcriptions would also be a nice enhancement (see the latest episodes of the .NET show), both to ease the viewing of lectures and enable their indexing by Google.

The University of Washington also has some interesting programs available online (UWTV).

Update:
Here are some more related links (which I didn't dig into much yet, since I just found them ;-).

More online CSE lectures pointers, from the University of Washington.

An aggregation of information on streaming and also links to stream archives.

End System Multicast (a system for broadcasting content) hosts some scheduled broadcasts of SIGCOMM03. It was previously mentioned on slashdot.

Here is an entry point at MSDN for creating web-based presentations with windows media, if you need to synchronize audio, video and html. Apparently, the html can be merged into the media stream itself and some authoring tools like the Producer extension for Powerpoint, that let you edit and synchronize your audio, video and slides.

That's indeed a very cool program, and I've tried to talk some of our profs into wanting to participating, thought I've gotten them on the wrong foot. Thanks for reminding me of that "Essential" Academic Link...

Less academic but still interesing, the Tech Ed 2003 presentations are available online http://microsoft.sitestream.com

SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center has some cool streams from a summer program. Here is the kind of heavy and groovy stuff they cover - Lectures will cover the basic principles of astrophysics and cosmology, including the cosmic microwave background, inflation, dark matter candidates and searches, the structure formation of the universe, and high energy cosmic rays. The school will be followed by a two-and-a-half day topical conference that surveys the latest results in particle astrophysics, cosmology, and high energy physics.