MCNC is the independent, non-profit operator of NCREN that serves educational institutions, organizations, and other community anchor institutions throughout North Carolina every day to help craft and implement distance learning strategies so every citizen can access educational content to gain a degree, hone their skills in their current job, or prepare for a career change.

 

NCREN handles more than 100 hours of classes, conferences and seminars each week and offers live streaming and archived sessions via Mediasite. Sonic Foundry and MCNC integrated TANDBERG videoconferences, now a part of Cisco Systems, with the Mediasite video content management and delivery platform. This initiative is part of Sonic Foundry’s new advanced integration services for enterprise and university clients seeking custom integration between Mediasite and other technology platforms. 

 

The integration enables bi-directional videoconferences that are recorded during multiple-location meetings to be automatically ingested, streamed, and archived via the Mediasite system. This integrated approach allows MCNC to reach more clients, many who were not at a videoconferencing endpoint for the live broadcast, by letting them now watch the videoconferences on-demand. Since MCNC provides the Mediasite webcasting and video management platform as well as the videoconferencing infrastructure, North Carolina schools are able to extend the reach of their Cisco TelePresence screen or any H.323 compatible device with Mediasite. 

 

“The great thing about using videoconferencing collaboratively with Mediasite is that you can send the video out in high quality to anyone who has internet,” said John Killebrew, vice president of community support at MCNC. “Mediasite allows us to expand our video services infrastructure to a larger audience and provide a way to review it on-demand. Integrating videoconferencing and Mediasite technology together means more research, online workshops, and other educational events can happen more frequently through video.”

 

In 2010, MCNC added Mediasite to its list of cost-effective services for schools, significantly expanding the webcasting and video management solution for NCREN constituent institutions. The North Carolina education community has the unique flexibility to choose between connecting their Mediasite Recorders to their own on-premise infrastructure that they maintain or to contract with MCNC’s hosted infrastructure service. 

 

North Carolina schools use Mediasite to train elementary science teachers on best practices and to reduce travel costs by allowing school administrators to present at business meetings online. MCNC as an institution also uses the webcasting technology for streaming applications such as board meetings.

 

“Our work with MCNC to integrate Mediasite with Cisco TANDBERG is a perfect example of the importance of interoperability in today’s educational technology solutions, and Sonic Foundry is proud to be a part of it,” said Sean Brown, vice president of education for Sonic Foundry. “While videoconferencing isn’t new to Mediasite, we’ve been live streaming and archiving videoconferences for almost a decade, this is Sonic Foundry’s first videoconferencing integration partnership of this magnitude.” 

 

The patented Mediasite webcasting and video content management platform quickly and cost-effectively automates the capture, management, delivery and search of live and on-demand streaming videos and rich media presentations that combine video with slides.  

 

MCNC is an independent, non-profit corporation. MCNC’s main focus is to operate the North Carolina Research and Education Network (NCREN). For a more than a quarter century, NCREN continues to provide advanced Intranet and Internet connectivity to a constantly expanding number of Community Anchor Institutions throughout North Carolina. Today‘s users of NCREN include all 17 institutions of the University of North Carolina System, all 58 North Carolina Community Colleges, all 115 K-12 public school districts as well as a growing number of K-12 charter and private schools, the majority of the state’s private colleges and universities, several non-profit and public health care facilities, and a number of the state’s premier research institutions. NCREN also serves as the Internet gateway network for all state employees. MCNC currently is working on a $144 million expansion of NCREN scheduled to be completed by summer 2013. This initiative has been labeled the Golden LEAF Rural Broadband Initiative. Visit www.mcnc.org or follow @MCNC or @GLRBI.

 

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.