Niche Video Media in Atlanta, Georgia offers an enterprise video hosting platform called Private Media Channel. It has been discontinued.
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Panopto
Score 9.1 out of 10
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Panopto is a video management platform for businesses and universities from the company of the same name in Seattle, supporting the recording, sharing, live streaming, and (after recording) sharing via LMS or internal video site, video search, and virtual classroom.
I'm not sure what the average user is looking for, but I can imagine a number of scenarios for which the platform offers a very flexible hosting service for a variety of users, with plenty of bells and whistles, for a reasonable costs that can protect content while offering a good interface between the publisher and their viewers.
The more I used it, the more I appreciated its ease of use. If I ever ran into a situation that I felt might be a learning opportunity at some point in the future, I would simply log in, record a session, and only allow access if/when it was appropriate later. Since the more recent versions also work on mobile phones, there really wasn't a time when I couldn't record something to review or present later. During covid, teachers didn't have access to their normal equipment, and students weren't always able to get access to a robust recording setup to do their recordings. Some students actually did recordings of presentations in their cars, or in the stairwells. Portability is powerful. I think that we all run into situations where our presentation didn't go quite as well as we had intended. As Panopto grew, they focused more on allowing the user to control their content and perform some basic (I would argue more than basic) editing, which made actions like awkward pauses easy to "fix" as you could create smooth, blended transitions easily.
It captures multiple streams simultaneous (video, desktop, audio only etc) and is pretty smart when it comes to working with imported PowerPoint Decks.
The end product can easily be shared in multiple formats and it has pretty rich content editing abilities for doing basic post-production clean up.
They have recently introduced an in-line quizzing feature which can integrate with your LMS's Gradebook.
The Analytics feature is very strong - we can get student level analytics when we integrate/embed the videos into our LMS.
Niche could add a more comprehensive online tutorial.
The Niche Web RTC program is amazing but it would be great if they had an app that would allow mobile devices to also connect even if they dont have chrome
It would be great if Niche could add a less comprehensive platform only for healthcare applications
Panopto doesn't fully support Ultra courses in Blackboard - we can do quizzing, which is very helpful, but we can't do video submissions like an Original course.
There is no built-in certificate option for completing a video and its quiz questions, which requires us to use additional systems for tracking and awarding.
Analytics are mediocre. The reporting tools are challenging to use and to get clear information on a consistent basis.
Quizzing is limited to multiple choice or T/F -- there is no reflection point or open-ended question format.
Immediate response from a knowledgeable rep - not a tier 1 automaton reading a script. I can, and have, reached them at all hours by phone, by chat, or by email. Responses are under 24 hours and frequently less than 1. And stuff gets DONE! I see things I request in almost every monthly release.
Panopto has been quick to answer any questions, but their rollouts and updates have caused issues where we felt a little blindsided by unexpected changes. Their development cycle is slow and often their promises for future updates have been extremely slow or never come.
The access controls of who can view, when one can view, how many times one can view, and from where they can view and also the security, and protecting from download [are better]. The review and approval workflow, editing the videos, blue-pen are all not available in Vimeo Pro.
At the end of the day, it came down to affordability for us. Panopto is affordable for smaller institutions. It is also geared primarily at lecture capture compared to many of the others that are first a media library. Panopto's focus is also education, so they do understand our audience.
I believe videos for training will be the way of the future. Once the initial cost of producing the videos is accounted for, other than hosting cost all views of the course will be income.
I believe creating short marketing videos will attract new customers.
