Recording Presentations: The Mediasite Advantage

In this presentation, Product Manager John Pollard explains why the Mediasite Recorder is better than any other approach to capturing rich media presentations. The presentation offers detailed support for the assertions that the Mediasite Recorder is the easiest to use, the most complete, and the most reliable recording appliance available on the market. NOTE: This is not intended to be a comprehensive discussion of the entire Mediasite solution - only the recording portion of the content life cycle. Other presentations will cover management, publishing, reporting, security, etc.

Hi, this is John Pollard with Sonic Foundry and I want to talk a little bit about Mediasite and,
specifically, what makes Mediasite a better approach than others to recording presentations.
And I think there are three general reasons why Mediasite is the best approach
to recording presentations: First of all, it's the easiest to use.
Secondly, it is the most comprehensive recording solution available.
And, finally, it's the most reliable solution available on the market.
I'll take just a few minutes to talk about each of these in detail.
Here at Sonic Foundry we've gone through great pains to hide the complexity
to the point that you'd almost think, "Wow!
That it looks really easy.
How hard could that be?
How complex is it?
Well, pretty complex when you consider everything that goes into recording rich media.
Why do we do that?
Well, we take these great pains because of people like this.
People like your presenters.
People who are afraid of change, people who are afraid of technology.
And we know and you know that is the greatest inhibitor to the growth and the spread
of these technologies that have all these wonderful benefits.
You know that if we cannot overcome their fears and we cannot make it easy to use
that they are not going to adopt it and it's not going to spread and, therefore,
you are not going to see the benefits of this type of solution.
So, one of our main tenets when it comes to recording here at Sonic Foundry is
"Don't change the way the presenter presents."
We think that's the best sort of philosophy to enable the quickest
and the most widespread adoption of this technology.
How do we do that?
Well, the first thing we do is we eliminate the need to upload content in advance.
Some solutions will have you upload slides or things like that or maybe days
in advance you have to upload content.
We don't feel like that's going to be a reasonable approach
when you are trying to encourage adoption.
And you know that presenters just want to walk in,
give their presentations, do what they do and walk out.
When we force them to change that we are sort of putting a constraint on them that is going
to leave a negative taste in their mouth when it comes to adopting this technology.
Another thing we do at Sonic Foundry
with Mediasite Recorders is we eliminate all the complexity as it relates to screen resolutions.
Now I'm getting a little technical here, but with some solutions
if you do not specify the screen resolution that the presenter is using or that the system is set
up for your end result is going to be terrible; so what we've done
with our Mediasite Recorders is we've automated that so that you don't have to do a thing.
We are going to detect what sort of resolution is being sent and we'll record
that appropriately and it's going to look wonderful whether that's coming from a computer
or any other device that your presenter is maybe using as presentation aids.
Now software.
Some solutions will ask you to install software on the presenter's computer
and we think that that's a bad approach.
We think that that changes the way the presenter presents and it also limits them too.
In some cases it may limit the operating system that they use on their computer,
but it also may limit what sort of presentation aids they use when they are presenting.
So we don't think that that's a good solution.
Furthermore when you have guest speakers that come in, it's really hard to explain to that
"Oh we need to get on to your computer and load something!"
and "Oh wait!
You don't have the right operating system.
Um...ah...oo this is going to be tough."
So we think in general software is not a good idea when it comes to mass adoption.
It also raises some support concerns that we'll talk about later.
Now I said that Mediasite is the most complete.
What do I mean by the most complete recording solution available?
Well I mean things like this, allowing you
to capture any presentation aid that your presenters are using.
Now we know presenters.
Some use laptops, some use Macintosh, some use PC, what have you, and that's great,
but they also use things like electronic microscopes, Smart boards,
they use medical imaging systems.
Whatever system has a video output, a VGA or a DVI output, we can take that information,
synchronize with the video of the presenter, and put that out to your audience there.
And that's what I mean by talking about a complete solution,
and not all solutions will allow you to do that.
Another area of uniqueness to Mediasite and our recorders is that we'll allow you to take
in full motion imagery even from your presentation aids.
So for example, if I am a physics instructor and I want to show you the effect of these ripples,
I could embed a video here and be able to display that in full motion
so that your audience could see the effects of those ripples.
So this is again an area that not all solutions will do very well at in supporting,
but with Mediasite, of course, it does.
Live is another area you should consider in a complete recording solution.
Why live? Well, on-demand is wonderful and on-demand will probably make up,
depending on the application that you're considering,
probably make up a lot of your content capture.
However there are times when you need to be able to go live.
It may be when you have a guest speaker, maybe an executive or a dignitary.
It might be a commencement exercise
or potentially a conference or even a sporting event.
All of these are examples where being able to go live is critically important
and it's something your recording solution needs to support, and Mediasite does support that.
This area is something that unless you've been doing this for a little while,
you may not even think about, but it's the ability to pause.
Now when I say the ability to pause I mean whether you are live
or whether you are on-demand, you need the ability to pause.
Why do I need to be able to pause?
Well, things happen on location, things happen in the room,
potentially there is some discussion
or maybe I'm presenting something that's, ah...has some copyright issues.
Maybe there are things going on in the room
that are simply not appropriate for, uh, for the distribution.
Or maybe it's just a break in the event or in the class you want to pause for,
so your solution should be able to pause and with Mediasite,
you can pause whether live or on-demand.
Now should something happen when you're recording where you did actually record,
didn't pause, and you want to take that out, this is where editing does make sense.
And with Mediasite we have a full-fledged editor that allows you crop the ends,
cut from the middle, you can replace the video, you can replace slides,
you can adjust the slide timings, um and all of that, all of those pieces are part
of a comprehensive recording solution, like Mediasite.
Now this should maybe go without saying, but one of the aspects
of a comprehensive recording solution is simply the quality.
You want high quality video that is yet bandwidth friendly,
but then you also want high quality images.
And this is the area I think where a lot of the solutions fall a little short.
You need to be able to capture at a very high resolution especially, depending on the type
of content that will be presented, if it's technical or if it's medical
or you have detailed diagrams that you want people to see that native resolution.
In fact, if you click on that little magnifying glass above this image,
and then hover your mouse over that image you'll be able
to see the native resolution of this image.
And that's the sort of detail you want to offer your audience
when you are delivering this content over the web.
Now another area as well is just being able to stay current with the times.
The video is moving to widescreen formats, as our slides and outputs from other devices,
so you want to be able to handle those widescreen aspect ratios, which Mediasite does.
 
Comprehensiveness also includes working
with the other technologies that your organization is using.
Whether that is room control systems like Crestron or AMX, it may also mean integration
with your learning management systems like BlackBoard or Moodle, and these are part
of what Mediasite has taken great pains to make sure that that integration is as seamless
as possible and in the case of like room control, we have certified interfaces
that ensure that your presenters can continue to work with those solutions
that they are already familiar with and so thus, we can again not change the way
that they are working and help promote a quicker, a faster adoption of this technology,
which is going to offer all those benefits which you are looking for in a solution such as ours.
Now if you want to keep hands off to really allow the presenter to simply do what they do
without having to know what's going on, you can use our scheduler which allows you
to automate the start and the stop of recording.
You set up a schedule in advance that will pick the days and the times and from that point
on the scheduler simply takes care of the automation
so your presenter then doesn't even have to know the recording is going on.
 
Speed of delivery.
A comprehensive solution is going to meet the needs of your audience
in ways that, um, meets their needs.
In this case we are talking about how we do things.
We encode the content right at our recorders so that your audience can have access
to that web-ready content as soon as the presentation is over.
So where as some other solutions will take the content, they'll ship it off,
which can take some time as those files can be large, ship it off for some transcoding
and some other production processes, we encode it, we made it web ready right at the encoder
so if, for example, you have medical student who want to leave that lecture
and begin immediately creating their study guides by reviewing things
and creating their study notes and things like that, this is going to be extremely important.
So for many of our customers speedy delivery is a critical component of the recording solution
and it's something that Mediasite is extremely unique in.
Another area of uniqueness is confidence monitoring.
What do I mean?
I mean you need to, from a remote location, be able to see that all
of these recorders are actually working, working properly.
That they're catching, capturing, and recording the content that you want.
So what Mediasite does, is we offer a web interface where you can look at the recorders,
you can see what video input is, you can see what the images being captured are.
You know the quality, you can see that the sound is being captured well.
It's more than just having a little green check box that says "hey we got a signal."
No. Having a signal does not mean that you are getting a good signal,
does not mean that you are getting what actually needs to be happening so being able to see
for yourself that things are going well is extremely important,
especially if you have a larger installation or you want
to grow this throughout your organization you need to be able to allow fewer people
to manage this so manageability is a critical part of having a comprehensive solution.
Let's talk about reliability.
What do I mean when I say we are the most reliable, and how can I say that?
Well, we take things, or we take responsibility for things
in our solution that other vendors, they don't.
For example, we have built our encoder from the ground up.
We take responsibility for how that digital information is translated
into web-ready content.
And, you know, some other solutions are going to point to third parties to have that,
and what that does is that introduces a point of failure, it also changes the way
that interface is so if you compare some of the interfaces out there
in the recording solutions you'll find that there is a great difference, and this goes back
to the ease of use that I discussed earlier in how some other solutions do it to how we do it
and that's because, like I said, we're taking responsibility for how that is handled.
We're also owning the hardware, we're owning the image capture card.
We've designed these, for Mediasite, they are manufactured for Mediasite-specific use
so we can control this environment that is doing all this work for you
and by controlling all these aspects of it, by controlling the software,
by controlling the encoder, by controlling the card and the hardware,
by having all that we can eliminate a lot of unnecessary complexities
that cause reliability issues and support issues.
So what's the result?
Well our customers are telling us that we have the most reliable solution available.
They're telling us that they haven't missed a recording in years.
They're telling us that their support costs are lower than with other solutions
because it just works, because it is simple, it is easy to use,
because we're not installing software, it's not like some of these other solutions
which require a huge investment in support personnel.
And finally our presenters are happy because it's not changing what they do
or how they do it, they can just do things as they've done and that is what allows you
to increase the adoption of these techniques which also lead to those benefits
that you're looking for in a solution like Mediasite.
So in summary, Mediasite is the easiest recording solution to use,
it's the most complete recording solution available,
and it's also the most reliable recording solution and I urge you just
to contact us and try it for yourself.
Then you'll see how easy it is to use, and you'll see how complete it is,
and you'll also get to see the reliability and I hope you will do that.
Thanks for your time.