Panopto /pə-näp’-tō/

Ask anyone who’s founded a business – if you’re going to hang out your shingle, it helps to have a name to put on it. So — why “Panopto”?

Panopto derives from panoptic, “the point at which everything can be seen in one view.” Panoptic in turn comes directly from the Greek word panoptos, “seen by all”.

In video, the panoptic view is the one that allows the viewer to see everything at once.

Our mission at Panopto is to democratize knowledge sharing with video. We believe that video has the power to fundamentally improve the way organizations communicate and the way students learn. So our software enables anyone to record and share video presentations that make the viewer feel like they’re actually there.

Students watching a college lecture can see the professor, their slides, and the whiteboard in a single view. Medical professionals watching a recorded surgery can see every step performed from multiple camera angles. Employees watching a town hall event from around the world can see the CEO, their PowerPoint slides, and product demonstrations as though they were sitting in the conference room. With Panopto, any idea – big or small – can be easily recorded, shared, and watched from any device.

Our video platform also enables people to see inside video in ways never before possible. We’ve built a unique video search engine that indexes the actual content within videos. This enables employees and students to find and fast-forward to any word spoken or shown within any video ever recorded. And for the first time, it enables businesses and academic institutions to build searchable video libraries of their institutional knowledge.

At Panopto, we’re building software that allows video to be used as a universal tool for learning and communication – making it easier to capture video from any angle, to watch video from any device, and to search inside video as easily as we search the web today.