There’s countless Online Video Platforms (OVPs) available. The most popular of them is also free: YouTube. What makes it onto this list, though, are platforms focused on the EDU market. That’s why you won’t find Vimeo or Brightcove on this list. Single sign-on support and integrations with platforms such as your institution’s LMS and web collaboration tools like Zoom or WebEx are key.
This survey of tools is likely to be the most incomplete as testing a number of these functions would require a degree of access to the platform that a vendor is likely hesitant to provide.
Kaltura
Supported Integrations: Canvas, Moodle, Brightspace by D2L, Blackboard
Comments: The market leader in the EDU vertical for video platforms, Kaltura recognized early in its existence the needs of the educational market and tailored a number of their features to that market. While also providing services to OTT and enterprise verticals, Kaltura continues to put a great deal of emphasis on EDU, regularly developing new tools for the industry and allowing for numerous 3rd party integrations.
Panopto
Supported Integrations: Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai, Bridghtspace by D2L, Bridge, Cornerstone, Saba, SAP SuccessFactors
YuJa
Supported Integrations:
YouTube
Supported Integrations:
Comments: It’s a tough call to include YouTube on this list. While it does provide single sign-on functionality through Google Apps/GSuite integration, YouTube hardly provides the kind of security that an EDU deployment requires (i.e. FERPA protections). YouTube’s primary goal is to get your video to as many viewers as possible. For a student assignment, that can be catastrophic. There is no easy way for a student to upload their assignment to YouTube and share it exclusively with an instructor or a cohort of peers in a class. You’re also not going to find any administrator level tools that will allow you to support your users.
Sonic Foundry Mediasite
Supported Integrations:
Comments: Among the biggest of the old school lecture capture providers, Mediasite started as on on-premise solution and has since migrated to the cloud. They continue to exist as a holistic A-to-Z solutions provider, from capture appliances to video delivery.
Echo360
Supported Integrations:
Comments: Mediasite’s chief rival in the early days of on-premise lecture capture solutions, Echo360 remains a force to be reckoned with as it too has moved to the cloud. Echo360 continues to provide complete lecture capture solutions to institutions.
MediaAMP
Supported Integrations: Blackboard, Canvas, Moodle, Drupal, Google, Zoom, Adobe, WordPress
Comments: Emerging originally out of development at the University of Washington, it was built atop a commercial media platform and customized for educational use.
VidGrid
Supported Integrations:
Comments: Formerly known as ilos.
Opencast
Supported Integrations:
Comments: Formerly known as Matterhorn, one of the oldest of the EDU online video platforms, Opencast grew up as a collaborative effort between a number of institutions but never made it into the cloud. Instead, Opencast Matterhorn institutions host servers on-premise and do most of the support and development in house or through 3rd party commercial firms.
Indeed, the inclusion of Opencast in this survey can be considerable questionable given that it’s not hosted in the cloud and thus may not be considered “online”, but it should still be considered by institutions should they wish to explore on-prem solutions, particularly institutions where cloud hosting may not be a viable option.
As Opencast matured, firms cropped up to provide hosting and development services, which is how Extron came to offer a commercial version of Opencast dubbed Entwine, before ultimately getting out of the market.
Without a commercially available cloud-based solution, a number of past supporters of the platform who can no longer justify the cost of in-house development and on-prem hosting are migrating away from Opencast.
Instructure Canvas Studio
Supported Integrations: Canvas
Comments: Formerly known as Arc.
Cloudinary
Supported Integrations:
ShareStream
Supported Integrations:
TechSmith Screencast.com
Supported Integrations:
Comments: Not necessarily focused on the educational market, TechSmith’s Screencast.com is so ubiquitous as to warrant a mention here. TechSmith’s Camtasia and Snagit tools both upload directly into Screencast.com and sharing your video from Screencast.com is as simple as copy/pasting a URL.
TechSmith Relay
Supported Integrations: Canvas
Comments: Relay is TechSmith’s EDU focused platform, with its own barebones screen recording tool. Users of TechSmith’s Snagit tool can also directly upload into Relay.
Microsoft Stream
Supported Integrations:
Comments: The most mysterious of video platforms, most institutions may be unaware that they have access to Microsoft Stream, which is likely included with their Office 365 site license.
Illumira
Supported Integrations:
Comments: Formerly known as NJvid.com
Warpwire
Supported Integrations:
Ensemble Video
Supported Integrations:
Last updated: November 5, 2019
