Mediasite 5.0 Debuts; New Classroom Recorders Coming in July

• By David Nagel
• 06/20/08

Sonic Foundry debuted a new version of its lecture capture platform Thursday at the InfoComm and EduComm conferences in Las Vegas. Mediasite 5.0 adds about 100 new or enhanced features for recording, playing back, and managing classroom recordings. The company also announced new hardware recorders for automated lecture capture, which are scheduled to ship next month.

According to Sonic Foundry, Mediasite 5.0 cranks out about 100 enhancements, including improvements to playback of course materials and management of recorded content. A sampling of other new features includes:

• New players;
• vCal support for meeting invitations;
• The ability to create more flexible "content organization hierarchies" through an updated Mediasite Catalog;
• Additional statistics and reports with graphics;
• RSS feeds that allow (authorized) users to subscribe to content; and
• Support for forwarding clips to other users while watching a presentation.

"We are looking forward to deploying Mediasite 5.0. It is the single-source platform with the proven ability to reliably scale campus wide, consistently helping us to deliver a quality product to faculty and students," said Bob Hillhouse, director of IT at the University of Tennessee, in a statement released yesterday. "Mediasite is an established and vital service for the University of Tennessee system. We're looking forward to what's coming next."

Also announced this week are updates to two of Sonic Foundry's automated classroom recorders: the Mediasite RL and Mediasite ML. Both now offer DVI connectivity, pause, center-cut editing, and widescreen capture.

Mediasite 5.0 is expected to be available at the end of summer. The Mediasite RL and ML Recorders are expected to be available in mid-July. Further information can be found here.

In other Sonic Foundry news, the company announced Wednesday that Penn State Dickinson School of Law has adopted Mediasite for lecture capture.

"Penn State Dickinson is delighted to have been recognized as Sonic Foundry's 1,000th customer. We chose Mediasite after careful consideration of its current features, the direction of its future development and, in particular, with respect to the ease of scheduling and handling of recordings. The system's cross-platform compatibility, by virtue of moving entirely to Microsoft's new Silverlight technology, also played a significant role in the decision," said John Davie, director of Instructional and Information Technology at Penn State Dickinson, in a statement released Wednesday. "In alignment with the school's philosophy of advantaging students wherever possible through appropriate exposure to technology--as is increasingly being requested by the courts and forward-looking law firms--the new Mediasite systems will further enhance our students' learning experience in an already technology-rich environment."