Smart Classrooms | InfoComm 2013 News

Mediasite Enterprise Video Platform Expands Capture Capabilities, Audio Search

• By David Nagel
• 06/13/13

Sonic Foundry is rolling out a major update to its flagship lecture capture system, the Mediasite Enterprise Video Platform, with new software and hardware additions and a new My Mediasite interface for creating and uploading media.

Mediasite is Sonic Foundry's core lecture capture, content management, and video deliver platform. It offers both hardware- and software-based video capture, rich media support, room capture, desktop capture, live and on-demand HD streaming, room control integration, presentation editing, search,mobile video, and analytics, among other features. It also offers integration with popular learning management systems, videoconferencing platforms, and room control systems. Supported LMSes include Blackboard Learn, Moodle, Desire2Learn Learning Environment, Instructure Canvas, and Sakai, among others. For room control, Mediasite supports Crestron, AMX, and Mediatech systems. And on the videoconferencing side, it supports Polycom and Cisco (including Tandberg) technologies.

The updated Mediasite, which debuted at this week's InfoComm 2013 conference in Orlando, includes new support for multi-format video capture, with the ability to capture multiple cameras at once and stream them within the Mediasite multi-window player.

Other new features include:

• New Voice Search Service that combines phonetic search with custom word lists to find content within a video;
• Mobile upload, allowing users to "upload content directly to Mediasite from any mobile device or any video format, including Adobe Flash, QuickTime, AVI, Windows Media, MPEG4 and others, and transform them into rich video files that are indexed, searched, secured and played back on nearly any device from desktops and tablets to smart phones";
• The new My Mediasite UI, which is designed to facilitate multilayered user workflows; and
• A "centralized, full spectrum recording model," which, as Sonic Foundry described it, "extends the power of video to any room, automatically extracting video from sources such as IP cameras and video conferencing tools," then combines and synchronizes them with other materials to create rich media.

Mediasite also offers a new hardware appliance, the Mediasite ML HD Recorder. A portable unit designed for webcasting from the field, the ML HD is half the size of its predecessor and is ruggedized for a range of environments.

The new features of Mediasite are being demonstrated this week at the InfoComm show in booths 3059 and 400. Additional details can be found on Sonic Foundry's site.