In the past few years, businesses and universities have been generating new proprietary videos at an unprecedented rate. The University of Arizona now captures more than 3,000 hours of video every week. The University of Essex recorded over 80,000 hours of video in the 2013-2014 school year. And according to Gartner, businesses around the world are amassing new video at a growth rate of up to 200% per year.
The question is, what happens to all those videos after they’ve been created? How are organizations getting value from the new videos being captured, and for that matter, from all the existing videos they’ve accumulated over the years?
For many corporations and academic institutions, this has become the biggest challenge of working with video.
Every day, Panopto talks with organizations who have video files scattered across their networks on file shares, SharePoint sites, and employee hard drives. These “video silos” make it nearly impossible for their people to find the video they’re looking for. And even if they do find it, there’s no guarantee that the video will play on the smartphone, tablet, or laptop that they happen to be using.
If videos can’t be found, and if they can’t be reliably watched on different devices, then all of the valuable content stored within them is locked away, and the videos are of little use.
Video content management systems (video CMSs) are built to address these challenges. A video CMS provides a central location for storing organizational media. It makes video universally available on any device. It provides a familiar YouTube-like interface for people to access the videos. And most importantly, a video CMS enables people to find and fast forward to content inside videos as easily as a search for words inside emails and documents.
With a video CMS, businesses and universities simply need to determine how to most efficiently get all of their new and existing videos into the system.
For small media collections, many video CMSs make it easy to import videos through a drag-and-drop interface. But if videos are scattered across multiple locations on the network, the task becomes more complex. And because new videos will continue to be generated by individuals and departments across the organization, a more systematic, automated approach to centralizing video is often needed.
That’s why more and more organizations are now looking to video CMSs that expose developer APIs in order to programmatically consolidate their video assets into one central, secure video library.
Recently, Panopto released a new API with precisely this goal in mind. The video upload API enables any developer using any programming language to write a few lines of code in order to ingest videos from across their network into their Panopto video CMS. Once the content is ingested, Panopto handles the tasks of making the video universally accessible and searchable. Specifically, our video CMS automatically transcodes the videos for playback on any laptop, tablet, or smartphone. And through the use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and optical character recognition (OCR), Panopto indexes every word spoken or shown anywhere in the video, so that people can search across their video library and within individual recordings for any word or phrase.
How easy is the video upload API to use?
Well, today we announced free, fully-functional sample code on our GitHub site that allows any developer to start using the API to ingest videos in less than 10 minutes. Here’s how it works.
First, download the sample code from GitHub:
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Second, download and install node.js:
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Third, install a few node.js packages – specifically util, path, request, and xml2js:
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Finally, run the sample app, specifying your Panopto server, the video file name, the title of your video, username and password, and the target folder ID:
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In minutes, your video will be uploaded, transcoded for playback, and indexed for search.
The upload API builds on the existing functionality of our developer platform, which provides an extensive set of interfaces for managing the entire lifecycle of your video:
- Creating live webcasts and on-demand recordings
- Automating and remotely controlling video recordings and live webcasts
- Managing individual recordings within the video library
- Managing collections of videos stored in folders
- Setting up and changing access control to videos and folders
- Administering users and groups
- Integrating Panopto with existing enterprise software and learning management systems
- Accessing detailed analytics for videos, users, and system health
- Searching across the video library and inside individual videos for any word spoken or shown
So if you’re looking to centralize your organization’s videos, and you need an easy-to-deploy, easy-to-use video CMS with the ability to drag-and-drop import your videos, Panopto’s got you covered. And now with the upload API, if you need to programmatically import your video assets into a video CMS, you won’t find an easier-to-use platform than Panopto.
Happy coding!
The post Start Centralizing Your Videos and Making Them Searchable… In Less Than 10 Minutes appeared first on Panopto Video Platform.