Sonic Foundry's Mediasite Delivers Mobile Lecture Playback
- By Dian Schaffhauser
- 01/03/12
Sonic Foundry has released a version of its lecture capture software that allows users to view presentations on their mobile devices. Version 6 of Mediasite, announced in October and released in December, features the ability to stream presentations live or on-demand to iPad, iPhone, iPod, Blackberry, and Android devices supporting HTML5 and H.264. The software detects what type of device is in use in order to optimize playback and uses native touch-friendly controls and navigation gestures.
"We will absolutely want to use Mediasite 6," said John Carpenter, chief technology officer at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. "The students have iPods and iPads that they do most of their computing on now, including most of their emailing and a lot of their web browsing. So it's natural for them to want to watch a classroom activity from these devices."
The latest release of Mediasite also features:
- The ability for users to do a system-wide search for words and phrases in indexed slide text, captioning transcripts, and presentation metadata in a single presentation, a presentation catalog, and across the institution's Mediasite library;
- Search engine optimization for public Mediasite material that taps into metadata, slide text, and closed captions;
- Improved Mediasite usage analytics;
- Support for H.264 video to be managed, secured, and tracked alongside Mediasite material;
- A mini player for embedding Mediasite resources in tiny spaces on blogs and Web pages;
- A customizable registration form for collecting information from viewers before letting them watch a presentation; and
- An enhanced screen reader mode when using the Mediasite Player with JAWS, Window-Eyes, or other screen readers.
More information is available at sonicfoundry.com/mediasite.
About the Author
Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.