Public procurement notice: Prior Information Notice Without Call For Competition
Published: 2020-02-18
Buyer: The Open University
Country: UK
Contract type: Supplies
CPV classification: 48500000 | 48510000 | 48520000

Technical requirements: The Open University (OU) is investigating the option of procuring a cost-effective cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) media delivery solution (video/audio-on-demand/streaming) for integration into the University’s Moodle-based VLE that is used to support the needs of approximately 200 000 formally registered (fee-paying) students and staff.
Suppliers that would like to respond to this pre-market engagement exercise must do so on In-Tend (https://in-tendhost.co.uk/openuniversity), details in communication above. A RFI pack is available to download on In-Tend. This prior information notice (PIN) is not a call for competition, for the purposes of Regulation 26(9) of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015.
The Open University (OU) is looking to develop a long-term relationship with a supplier that will address hygiene factors surrounding the delivery of media over the internet and also provide best-of-breed pedagogical innovation. The emphasis is on integration with our existing VLE and the possibility to integrate with our future archiving solutions (potentially storage services using Amazon Web Services/Microsoft Azure). It is crucial that the media player is fully accessible and also operable across major desktop, tablet, mobile and smart-TV platforms.
Solution must be able to support adaptive bitrate streaming and allow users to automatically consume different media asset qualities based on their platform/network/device capabilities.
Solution should offer innovative media delivery features suitable for use in an educational context e.g. such as chapter markers, in-video annotations/quizzing, video branching, etc.
Media consumption through the media player should be fully accessible to all and solution should comply with all local UK legislation
Solution should offer support for detailed data analysis of user interactions. Analytic data storage and manipulation to be appropriately legally compliant.
Solution should support automated workflow, with appropriate notifications and task management from master file ingestion to appropriately encoding and packaging media for delivery to consumers and eventual archiving.
The solution must offer the capability to integrate, using industry standard approaches, with other parts of the OU digital estate.
Currently our VLE holds approximately 18 500 unique video assets at a mean size of approximately 39 MB
For our formal (fee-paying) learning systems that are accessible by approx. 200 000 students and staff in May 2017 there were 300 000 views of 6 400 videos by 23 000 unique users. As video usage is increasing year-on-year it would be reasonable to expect in excess of 4 500 000 views in 2020.
For our formal (fee-paying) learning systems it has been estimated that peak downloads in a minute is less than 150.
Our informal (free, public access) learning system (OpenLearn) has a more complicated user profile due to its public nature — the usage profile will be highly irregular. Visitor numbers will spike with a high concurrent user access for a period after transmission of BBC/OU co-produced programmes.
Initially only 20-30 staff would be expected to have the ability to upload media into the system for processing/delivery.
Information security should comply with ISO 27001, GDPR and support requirements such as anti-malware/anti-virus checking of uploads.