I’m at a session of the SCHoMS (Standing Council of Heads of Media Services) about recording lectures this morning. Aside from some technical problems delaying the start (some amount of schadenfreude seeing AV salesmen struggling with the technology) some interesting presentations – just brief summaries here.

Mediasite

Mediasite is a product from Sonic Foundry (now the only product from Sonic Foundry).

Allows recording, storage, management and delivery of lectures/sessions. Integrates with Crestron panels. Also has API for VLEs or other integration.

Captures all VGA outputs – so video and data. Can put in ‘bookmarks’ to link video to the data display at that time – so can easily jump through presentation to each slide and linked video (but requires manual process during the presentation to sync these together).

Now concentrating on the content management aspects. Especially concentrating on search and retrieval aspects – currently supports search of any text content – including OCRing any text content under visualisers and document cameras. They are expecting to launch phonetic searching in the next few weeks so that any mentions of words in video or audio files are also picked up.

Anycast

Anycast Station is a all-in-one Live Content Producer. IT takes feeds from cameras or data. Can control up to 16 cameras with presets. Can be mixed etc. on the fly, or, in conjunction with hard disks attached to the back of the unit, can be re-mixed in post production.

Looks like a nice piece of kit, but do we have the expertise and staff resource to use it? However, the presenter is talking about kitting out a studio with Anycat HD Cameras, Anycast lighting, and the Anycast station, for 60k-70k – which sounds quite cheap.

Impact Marcom

Uses Windows technology to deliver cost effective solutions. In terms of product, offering something similar to Mediasite above, but arguing that can be done more cost effectively by using Windows media server, and Windows media player.

Essentially Impact Marcom are not selling a product, but rather offering a consultancy package to acheive the same result. It doesn’t look like they have the same kind of content management to offer as media site, but could be a lower budget way of acheiving the recording and streaming – estimates about 10k for equpiment if you don’t already have appropriate servers and encoders, then something in the region of 3 days training.