Upload API Dramatically Reduces Cost and Effort of Consolidating and Managing Media Assets

SEATTLE, July 10, 2014 – Today, Panopto, a leading video software provider for the enterprise and education markets, released a major update to its developer platform. The update provides businesses and universities with a video upload API that dramatically simplifies the process of centralizing, managing and searching libraries of organizational knowledge.

As video use in business and education continues to grow at an exponential rate, organizations increasingly find that valuable recordings are scattered across Sharepoint sites, network file shares, and employee hard drives. These “video silos” create two challenges for internal communication and knowledge sharing. First, they make it nearly impossible for people to find videos and the information contained within them. Second, even if the videos are found, they often can’t be played back on tablets and smartphones due to video format incompatibility.

Panopto’s video content management system (VCMS) and the new upload API overcome these challenges, providing an easy way to programmatically ingest videos into a central library and make them universally available within the organization or across the Internet. The API also brings unique search capabilities to videos, enabling people to find content within their media as easily as they search within email or documents.

With only a few lines of code, any developer using any programming language can use the upload API to import most common video formats as well as specialty formats like Flash, Camtasia, and GoToMeeting. Once files are imported into Panopto’s VCMS, they are automatically processed for:

• Playback on any device – Panopto automatically transcodes videos into formats that can be viewed on any laptop, tablet, or smartphone.
• Searching inside video content – Panopto uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) and optical character recognition (OCR) to index every word spoken and shown within videos, enabling users to search across their video library and inside their recordings.

The API is also ideal for teams who have developed custom workflows for their video content. These workflows provide requirements on how video is recorded, edited, approved, and distributed. With Panopto’s developer platform, these workflows can be easily extended to included the use of a VCMS as a central location for sharing video across the organization.

“The value of organizational video isn’t in the individual recordings – it’s in bringing those recordings together into a centralized, searchable library,” said Eric Burns, co-founder and chief product officer, Panopto. “Panopto has always provided the easiest way for businesses and universities to create, consolidate and search all of their media. Now, we’re opening that opportunity to developers around the world, providing the easiest way to programmatically ingest every video their organizations have ever created.”

The upload API builds on the existing functionality of Panopto’s developer platform, which provides an extensive set of interfaces for managing the entire lifecycle of organizational video:

• Creating live webcasts and on-demand recordings
• Automating and remotely controlling video recordings and live webcasts
• Managing individual recordings within the video library
• Managing collections of videos stored in folders
• Setting up and changing access control to videos and folders
• Administering users and groups
• Integrating Panopto with existing enterprise software and learning management systems
• Accessing detailed analytics for videos, users, and system health
• Searching across the video library and inside individual videos for any word spoken or shown

As part of the developer platform update, Panopto has released free sample code on Github (https://github.com/Panopto/UploadAPISamples). The code includes a client app that demonstrates Panopto’s upload protocol, and a fully-functional Node.js sample that enables developers to start using the upload API in a matter of minutes.

More information on the developer platform update is covered in a video interview with Eric Burns, and in a short video demonstrating the Node.js sample:

About Panopto
Panopto creates software that enables enterprises and academic institutions to record and view searchable video presentations in minutes from any device. Panopto is currently in use at Fortune 500 companies around the world and is the fastest-growing lecture capture solution at leading universities. Privately-held, Panopto was founded in 2007 by technology entrepreneurs and software design veterans at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. For more information, visit www.panopto.com.

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