http://www.techsmith.com/techsmith-relay.html
Product Overview
Relay is a software-based lecture recording tool. It focuses on a manual workflow designed for simple capture and streamlined external publishing integrations. It was formerly used by the School of Nursing at Duke, and users have responded favorably to its simple interface.
Relay has added new publishing options since we last looked at them that include the ability to generate a URL to an embedded video. Though this player doesn’t include rich media capabilities like Panopto or Mediasite, Relay now offers an impressive ability to embed interactive quizzes underneath each video, and offers analytics for parsing responses as well as detailed viewing statistics in conjunction with the Active Directory integration supported by the system. For example, instructors can see who watched what percentage of each video, and can review and respond to notes sent to them by their students within the interface.
Core Distinguishing Feature Set
- Ease of use/ faculty-friendly recording interface
- Simple publishing workflow
- Built-in quizzing and analytics
- Integrations with other Techsmith products, including Camtasia, Snagit and Knowmia, a learning object repository that supports instructors creating their own presentations on iPads
- Various publishing options including YouTube, Amazon S3, Kaltura, and screencast.com
- Records PIP webcam video
- Automatic captioning via speech to text and a built in captioning editor (captioning is based on user accounts, so should get more accurate over time
- iOS and Android apps (called Fuse) for making recordings
- Subscription-based hosting service added in 2012
- Mediasite partnership
Recent Updates
Release notes for recent version of Relay can be found here:
https://www.techsmith.com/techsmith-relay-self-hosted-version-history.html
Relay and Duke
Relay doesn’t appear to be attempting to compete with full-fledged solutions like Mediasite and Panopto that offer true enterprise lecture capture. Because of this, and because Relay’s server licenses (http://assets.techsmith.com/docs/pdf-camtasiaRelay/Camtasia_Relay_Licensing.pdf) do not scale up for campus-wide deployments (they are limited to 7 simultaneous encoding jobs), Relay may be better suited for deployment by individual schools and departments instead of entire institutions, so it is not currently a good candidate to be the central component of DukeCapture.