PITTSBURGH, Pa. (PRNewswire) February 10, 2009 – Panopto, Inc. announced the pending release of the next version of its free lecture platform, CourseCast v2.1. The company is also expected to release an accompanying Blade Pack consisting of several new valued-added features and services.

Eric Burns, Panopto’s co-founder and CTO, stated: “CourseCast 2.1 and the new Blade Pack are significant additions to the CourseCast lecture capture platform. Now with a single click, even novice users can create and publish rich presentations with video, PowerPoint slides, and screen captures. With our new broadcasting add-on, anyone with a Panopto Hosted account or CourseCast installation can stream live presentations to hundreds or even thousands of viewers, right from the desktop. Students can take their recordings on the go on their iPod, iPhone, or H.264-compatible devices with our video podcasting add-on. And with our new analytics system, educators can quickly understand viewing patterns of their presentations, allowing them to key in on the areas of most interest to their viewers.”

CourseCast 2.1 and the 2.1 Blade Pack add several enhancements to make life easier for both users and administrators. For content creators, the update dramatically simplifies the user interface for selecting input sources and starting a recording. The new Panopto Recorder has the ability to remember recording settings, and even allows administrators to pre-configure recordings for novice users. In addition, version 2.1 supports screen recording at adjustable frame-rates (for motion sensitive applications), the ability for viewers to take public and private notes, and PDF documents displayed directly in the CourseCast player.

Administrators will enjoy several new features and utilities, including the ability to remotely manage recording configurations across the enterprise through a single web site, a background service that automatically transfers new recordings to the server even when the Panopto Recorder is closed, and speaker biography / abstract support and enhanced LDAP support. Using the analytics system, administrators can see at a glance how people use their CourseCast servers.

Company officials stated that the core CourseCast 2.1 platform and the optional Blade Pack will be made available to beta users the last week of February. At the end of the beta period, the core platform will ship free of charge to all Socrates Program participants and the Blade Pack will be made available to Panopto Hosted and Service contract subscribers.