Video distribution is high on my priority list. We have made the most of iTunesU, our own Darwin streaming server, You-Tube, Vimeo and even Moodle. But the effort does not justify the means any more. Dealing with copyright issues is becoming more strategic and of course the overall amount of media objects being distributed has been exploding for a number of years now. We tried to conquer the OpenCast Matterhorn project, but it is not hard to figure out that open source projects either have momentum or they fade away. Plus most of the solutions that have been pitched have more of a focus on the ingestion of video for processing help. Distribution is a by-product that is typically not fully developed.

Lecture capture has been the commercial money maker with value coming from the ease of capture and production. But why would we want to capture lectures when the reason for all of this extra video is to supplement the trend toward blended learning. We have a fair investment in Camtasia so we are interested in video distribution of these Camtasia video vignettes  so maybe Camtasia Relay makes sense. But I think we are really looking at a solution like Kaltura, ShareStream, MediaCast or Ensemble. And I lean toward a hosted solution since my network is not optimized for streaming nor should it be. The solution must focus on the flexibility of access control so that we can comply with copyright. A little help with video ingestion formatting would be nice but our media students are very good with that support. Option to integrate with our Moodle LMS is important. And it does not hurt for the solution to help manage other content streams like podcasts or other commercial video repositories. I will let you know what we select.

Results are in – we will be going with a ShareStream hosted solution. Our media team is very excited about moving content over to a distribution system that provides access control. The Moodle interface is good but they probably need to focus more on the major LMS in the world.