In 1998, SURA provided seed funding to four SURA member institutions - the Georgia Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Tennessee - to begin ViDe, the Video Development Initiative. This self-formed group came together as a result of mutual interest in promoting the deployment of digital video within higher education and research by leveraging collective resources and expertise towards addressing current deployment challenges. Since that time, ViDe has expanded to include members from other regions within the U.S. and also international members. ViDe activities have contributed significantly to the successful deployment of digital video in higher education and research. More detail on ViDe and ViDe's current activities is available on the ViDe Web site.

SURA has continued its support for ViDe in subsequent years through targeted funding that contributes to the organizational strength of the group and also directly supports the continuation and enhancement of specific projects.

SURA, along with BBN Technologies, co-sponsored the LSVNP (Large Scale Video Network Prototype) project, a project of ViDe. LSVNP was an 18-month advanced networking project designed to investigate, deploy, and disseminate information regarding model architectures for video services. As a significant project component, LSVNP provided H.323 video conferencing services for use by actual project teams distributed throughout the U.S.. This enabled several projects to investigate the use of video conferencing as it applied to their own project objectives while serving as a proving ground for related emerging digital video technologies. The Web site that supported LSVNP is being maintained for future reference at http://www.vide.net/lsvnp.

On September 27, 2000, SURA sponsored a meeting that brought together engineers from three differing digital conferencing technology efforts for a full day technical discussion. Attendees included RADVision (leading ITU H.323 standard & stack developer), ViDe, VRVS (Virtual Room Video Conferencing Service, from CalTech/CERN), and the NCSA Alliance AccessGrid. These efforts are of specific interest and impact to the SURA community since there are user "islands" of collaborative conferencing beginning to form around each of these technologies within the SURA region. The final report from this meeting served as a first and formal step for those involved in investigating the necessity and probable impact of gateway development.