Video

U Michigan Library Adds Video Streaming Service

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 09/14/15

The University of Michigan is one of the newest institutions to adopt a service that delivers streaming video to colleges and universities. Kanopy said it has added 377 new higher ed customers for the 2015-2016 academic year. Other new customers include the University of California, San Diego; Howard University; and Dartmouth College.

U Michigan's library introduced Kanopy to its community in August. Although the service boasts 26,000 documentaries, training films and theatrical releases in its collection, U Michigan focused its announcement on 600 videos in the area of the arts.

Users are able to browse videos by subject or title. They can also create playlists and video clips. Streaming can be done on a PC with Flash, a Mac, iPads, iPhones and other mobile devices. The movies can be projected in classrooms, embedded into authenticated Web pages, including learning management system courses, and watched by any number of simultaneous viewers.

Institutional customers pay only for the videos their users watch. Payment is activated only after a given film is viewed four times over the course of a year.

Among the many collections included in the service are BBC Active, Criterion Collection and PBS.

"Kanopy's streaming video model has provided UMass Amherst with significant pedagogical as well as economic value," said Scott Stangroom, acquisitions librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a customer since 2013. "Kanopy's interface is aesthetically beautiful and intuitive to use. The dashboard analytics display is the best I've encountered, allowing for easy, in-depth and meaningful usage analysis."