The announcement includes a family of features aimed to radically accelerate the adoption of lecture capture and video content management for education institutions at all stages of the blended learning life cycle. New capabilities available in Mediasite 6 include:

 

Live or on-demand streaming of any Mediasite presentation to iPad, iPhone, iPod, Blackberry or Android device using HTML5 and H.264

 

The first and broadest range of live mobile streaming from a professional-grade webcasting appliance and rich media management platform 

 

System-wide search for words and phrases in a single presentation, a presentation catalog and across your entire Mediasite library based on indexed slide text, captioning transcripts and presentation metadata

 

Search engine optimization for public Mediasite content by exposing more information about your presentations, including metadata, slide text and closed captions, to the search engine

 

Enhanced Mediasite analytics with embeddable analytics widgets and iOS-friendly reports 

 

Ingestion support for any H.264 video to be managed, secured and tracked alongside Mediasite content

 

Touch-friendly Mediasite Mobile Catalog for tablets and mobile devices

Web-friendly, resizable mini player for embedding Mediasite content in tight spaces on blogs and web pages

 

Custom presentation and catalog registration allowing users to collect valuable information about viewers before they watch a webcast

 

Enhanced screen reader mode when using Mediasite Players with JAWS, Window-Eyes or any other screen reader

 

Multiple Mediasite Management Portal enhancements

 

"We will absolutely want to use Mediasite 6. 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," said John Carpenter, chief technology officer at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business.

 

"Lecture capture and retrieval tools have been shown to have positive effect on student grades and retention, and they promise to be important pedagogical tools. The ability to index lectures and the ability to offer playback of selected passages have proven key to these positive results," reported Marti Harris, Gartner research analyst, in the Hype Cycle for Education, July 2011. "Practical benefits of lecture capture include review, improved scores, improved retention, convenience, and a new option for students to make up planned or unplanned absences."

 

"For ten years, we've been singularly focused on creating the most reliable, scalable and automated lecture capture system on the market. Using our automated and integrated approach our customers have enjoyed success with their Mediasite deployments. Not only are they increasingly generating vast amounts of original Mediasite content, they are also efficiently pulling in user-generated content from desktop sources. Now it's time to identify new ways to manage and distribute campus knowledge," said Rob Lipps, executive vice president of sales for Sonic Foundry. "Customers and analysts rave about our content management and distribution system for online video and rich media is leading edge, and we now have the opportunity to unleash the power of that platform for other uses."

 

The company will be live streaming EDUCAUSE keynotes and concurrent sessions in Philadelphia this week, demonstrating Mediasite's mobile playback as well as live HD streaming and Smooth Streaming in booth 1219. Mediasite is the recognized leader for room-based lecture capture and video-based knowledge management which improves student learning outcomes, delivers successful online programs, accelerates adoption and reliably scales campus wide. It provides the complete platform to record, stream, archive, manage and track your institution's instruction and online events, both live and on-demand. Mediasite was named Best Webcasting Platform by Streaming Media readers for four consecutive years, and Sonic Foundry was named Global Market Share Leader for Lecture Capture by Frost & Sullivan in three consecutive reports.

 

About Sonic Foundry®, Inc.

Sonic Foundry (NASDAQ: SOFO, www.sonicfoundry.com) is the trusted market leader for enterprise webcasting and lecture capture, providing video communication solutions for education, business and government. Powered by the patented Mediasite webcasting platform and Mediasite Events group, the company empowers people to transform the way they communicate online, using video webcasts to bridge time and distance, accelerate research and improve performance. Product and service names mentioned herein are the trademarks of Sonic Foundry, Inc. or their respective owners.