It is my great privilege and honor to announce the opening of the Rex and Alice A. Martin Media Center for Notre Dame faculty and staff on September 5, 2017. The Martin Media Center is a game-changer for Notre Dame. The cutting edge audio-video production capabilities of this facility are at the head of the class in higher education and rival national network facilities. As a campus community, we owe a great debt of gratitude to Rex and Alice Martin for their extraordinary generosity in making this state-of-the-art center a reality.
The center is truly remarkable in a couple of ways. First, the University has designed the Martin Media Center in keeping with a 'shared services' model. The primary tenant of this philosophy is that technology and services, when at all possible, should be constructed/implemented in a central way that allows campus users to draw from an aggregated pool of resources. This encourages standardization, saves money and increases operational efficiency. These benefits are particularly true for the capital-intensive technology required for high quality multimedia production. There is only one other University in the country that has taken this approach for media production, as most operate in highly de-centralized environments. At Notre Dame, academic video producers will work alongside and share resources with faith media producers, athletic producers and others; a truly unique model in higher education.
Second, the Martin Media Center technology core was designed to flatten the technology obsolescence curve. Scott Rinehart, director of broadcast technology, established a 'flexibility for future growth' philosophy during the facility design that has resulted in an internet protocol (IP) based audio-video technology core. So, for example, as demand for producing, recording and distributing multimedia content grows across campus, the Martin Media Center video routing capability, because it is managed over the internet, can theoretically scale infinitely to meet that demand. Traditional routers are constrained by a limited number of inputs and outputs. The Martin Media Center is one of only a handful of media facilities in the world that are 100% IP-based.
I am humbled to lead Notre Dame Studios, a new group within the Office of Information Technology (OIT) that schedules, operates and maintains the Martin Media Center. Our mission is to provide technology and support to make the creative vision for campus life and recorded multimedia production a reality. I look forward to welcoming departments from across campus to schedule a tour of the Rex and Alice A. Martin Media Center and discuss Notre Dame Studios' services.
Yours in Notre Dame,
Dan Skendzel, Executive Director Notre Dame Studios