Product Overview
Mediasite is considered by many to be the premier lecture capture system, with a compelling line of premium hardware devices and an industry-leading feature set. It scored highest on Duke’s 2009 evaluation but was ruled out because it is significantly higher in price than other products, and because at the time it lacked a software capture option for mobile capture. Mediasite content is created and published in a way similar to Panopto, with a rich media viewer and browser/ platform-agnostic video podcasts as its chief output.
Looking forward, hardware (PC)-based appliances continue to be a major focus for Mediasite, with improved HD-capable recording appliances, including a 4-input HD recording option. Mediasite continues a notable shift it began in 2013 into the content management space, moving its external media ingest functionality to the forefront of its marketing efforts and adding new indexing functionality for external media (phonetic search and OCR).
Mediasite has strengthened its LMS integrations in recent years, and now offers LTI integrations for Sakai, Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle. It continues to feature an Air-based desktop recording client for Mac, and PC, and has added a service called Mediasite Join for integration with video conferencing systems. Mediasite recently added the ability to capture content feeds as video instead of as .jpegs for those who want that choice. For those looking to transition from a different lecture capture system, Mediasite continues to offer what they call Advanced Integration Services (AIS). This works via custom toolkits that can either be handed off to the customer for operation in self-service mode, or executed by Mediasite as a professional service.
Core Distinguishing Feature Set
- Appliance-based (scheduled) recording
- AIR-based desktop software recorder
- Rich media playback (video, content, thumbnails, metadata/ search)
- Comprehensive Web UI for configuration, monitoring, and reporting
- HTML5 playback for both Android and iOS devices
- Designed for campus-wide scale
- Live webcasting
- Web-based editor (formerly desktop editor)
- Detailed player customization (turn any feature on/off)
- Ability to import, transcode, index, and catalog outside video content
- Search (Recording metadata, PPT, Keynote text, OCR)
- Search engine optimization for public content
- Speech to text, phonetic search, and OCR (separate licenses)
- Content sunsetting feature
- Feature-rich web editor
Recent Updates
- LTI integrations for Sakai, Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle
- A review/ edit/ approval process
- Option to record content as video or .jpeg slides
- The ability to create custom catalogues (visual representations of subsets of content)
- A new “call and record” production service where Mediasite will record your event for you
- Mediasite Join, a service that records video conferences by adding Mediasite Join as a participant to your video conference
Mediasite and Duke
Mediasite is currently in use in a few schools related to medical education. Duke Medical Center made an effort to standardize on Mediasite beginning in 2012, and it is currently being using it at their School of Medicine (several appliances managed via a central control room), the School of Nursing, and the Duke Physician Assistant Program. In a feature by feature comparison, Panopto stacks up well against Mediasite, with both solutions, for example, including the ability to do OCR on video content, including external media ingest, as well as speech-to-text analysis (although for Mediasite the latter involves a separate licensing fee). Despite possible quantity discounts, it’s our opinion that the delta in costs between the current solution and Mediasite would not provide enough value to warrant a change in platform.
