Panopto Announces the Easiest Way to Consolidate Video Collections

The Latest Product Release by Panopto Also Expands Support for Video Management, Editing, Analytics, and Quizzing

Panopto announced the latest update to its enterprise video platform. The release continues Panopto’s focus on making it easy to centralize, search, and manage video content. As part of this update, Panopto has announced a new public specification that enables organizations to consolidate disparate video collections into secure, centralized repositories. Panopto has also further enhanced its video content management system with new features focused on video curation and interactivity.

An open standard for integrating video collections

In recent years, businesses and universities have amassed vast quantities of video content from recorded online meetings, webinars, lectures, training videos, product demos, marketing videos, and more. Yet in most of these organizations, video assets are scattered across employee hard drives, file shares, general-purpose content management systems, and other web portals. As a result, they remain undiscoverable and yield little value to the organization.

To address this challenge, Panopto is introducing the Universal Content Library Specification (UCLS). The UCLS is an open, XML-based format for describing collections of videos so that they can be imported into a central repository and streamed securely to any device. It is the first open format for describing large, organized media collections of heterogeneous video file types, library metadata, and rich media presentations.

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With its support for the UCLS via RESTful APIs, Panopto provides organizations with an easy path to consolidating their video collections regardless of how and where they’re currently stored. For example, a business could import its web conference recordings from Zoom and BlueJeans, training videos from SharePoint, corporate communications videos from Google Drive, and marketing videos from a network file share.

During import, Panopto validates video collections for missing files and individual video files for corruption. Once imported, videos are then indexed for search and transcoded for playback on any device using the HLS protocol.

The UCLS builds on the Universal Capture Spec, which provides an open format for describing individual media files and their associated metadata (audio, video, slides, attachments, captions, timeline events, and metadata). The specifications are published to Github and available to developers at no cost.

“The UCLS helps organizations consolidate their video assets into living libraries of institutional knowledge,” said Eric Burns, co-founder and CEO of Panopto. “Video libraries are strategic, long-term investments, and the companies and universities building them want control and flexibility. The UCLS provides an open format for all video platforms to interoperate, improving customer choice and control of data. We invite all providers of video content management solutions to help improve the UCLS and collectively ensure the portability of organizations’ private video libraries.”

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Enhancing video curation, interactivity and user engagement

As part of its continuing efforts to simplify content curation and enable users to actively engage with video, Panopto is introducing a range of additional updates to its video content management system.

In large businesses and universities, multi-departmental use of Panopto is driving demand for video management at the business unit level. To address this need, Panopto is introducing departmental home pages. This enables individual departments to curate their own YouTube-like landing pages that highlight featured and new videos.

Panopto is also expanding the ways in which customers can interact with videos during playback.

First, Panopto’s video quizzes are now supported in the embeddable video player. This enables users to take quizzes directly from within their learning management systems (LMS), content management systems (CMS), and other web portals. The embeddable video player can be accessed from desktop web browsers and mobile devices.

In addition, Panopto now supports threaded discussions with moderation in the interactive video player. When users reply to a video comment, Panopto will automatically create a “thread”, or a visual grouping of the comment and its replies. Video creators can moderate discussions and delete off-topic or inappropriate comments.

All of the updates in today’s release will be available to existing Panopto customers at no additional cost.

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