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Panopto creates software that enables businesses and academic institutions to record and view searchable video presentations in minutes from any device. Businesses can use Panopto to record and live stream:

• Employee training and onboarding video• Review, recap, and summary communications• Product demonstrations • All-hands meetings• Sales and marketing

presentations• Web conferences• Executive communications• Events for customers, press,

and investors

Panopto also enables individual employees to record and share videos in a secure, centralized video library. This facilitates:

• Social and informal learning• Capturing the knowledge of retiring employees• Sharing knowledge across a global workforce

Panopto’s video library includes unique search functionality that enables employees to search inside videos for any word mentioned or shown onscreen during a video.

Panopto is currently in use at Fortune 500 companies around the world and is the fastest-growing lecture capture solution at leading universities. Privately-held, Panopto was founded in 2007 by technology entrepreneurs and software design veterans at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science.

Panopto was recently recognized by Gartner as a “leader” in its 2014 Enterprise Video Content Management Magic Quadrant. Learn more at http://panop.to/gartner-leader.

Want to try Panopto for yourself? Visit www.panopto.com today for a free 30-day trial or to schedule a demonstration of our software.

panoptoon A PAGE

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now Is The Right Time To Consider How Your organization Manages Video ....... 4

Video search: What content is automatically indexed? .................................. 5

Production steps: How does a user record and share a video? ..................... 6

required hardware: Itemize required hardware ............................................... 7

streaming: How does a user create and share a live video stream? .............. 8

multi-Camera: How many video inputs can be recorded simultaneously? .... 9

developer aPi: Summarize and document any available platform API ......... 11

add-ons: Itemize what is/isn’t included in the core license ............................ 12

disaster recovery: List protections against outages and system failures ...... 13

scale: Document ability to support growth and spikes in demand ............... 14

mobile: List native apps that provide support for searching and viewing ..... 15

+network support: Describe support for modern streaming protocols ......... 15

Get Started With Video In Less Than one Day ...................................................... 17

OVERVIEW

The Top 10 Questions You need To AskIn Your Video Platform RFP

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now is the right time To Consider How Your organization Manages Its VideoAs video becomes more integral to how businesses communicate, how teachers teach, and how we all share ideas and information, many organizations are quickly finding that nowistherighttime to review how they’ve managed video content in the past and how they plan to manage it in the future.

That’s because video is unlike any other content:

• Different video recorders often produce different types of video files, many of which cannot be played back on other devices

• Video files are significantly larger than text documents and can quickly exceed maximum file size restrictions on common content management systems

• And video files are traditionally impossible to search, limiting the value of any recording to anyone looking for specific content

But even in the face of these challenges, the popularity of video is exploding. Academic institutions are individually recording 80,000 hours of video every year. 76% of executives already watch a business video at least weekly, and Gartner Research predicts by 2018, every employee in every company will interact with video at work three times every day.

The growing prevalence of video has prompted Forrester Research to recommend organizations “Plan for video content, not just videoconferencing.” Doing so offers a variety of rewards, from reducing the cost of meetings and events, and improving training and executive communications, to enhancing remote employee engagement and encouraging internal social learning.

Delivering those returns starts with finding the right video platform.

For many organizations, however, this is a no small task. The video platform market is young by enterprise IT standards, meaning feature-for-feature comparisons may be difficult to research. And details crucial to successful implementation are all too often obfuscated by video technology standards and industry jargon.

Finding your next video platform doesn’t have to be complicated. All you need are the right questions in your next Request For Proposal (RFP). A sharp video platform RFP will make it easy to sort out the contenders and spot the options that can actually meet your organization’s video needs, both now and for the future.

So what are the right questions to ask in a video platform RFP? Here are our top ten recommended (jargon-free!) inquiries to include.

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1. Are all spoken and written words automatically indexed for search?

Enterprise and academic videos often run 30-60 minutes or longer, so being able to find and fast-forward to specific moments is essential. Many platforms, however, offer only basic search capabilities — making it difficult and time consuming to find phrases mentioned by a speaker or words shown on-screen.

Panopto’s Smart Search is the industry’s most comprehensive video content search technology. Forrester Research has even commended Panopto for providing “the best support for video search.” Smart Search indexes every video in your Panopto library, whether or not it was created with Panopto, and can find:

• Any word spoken, with automatic speech recognition

• Any word that appears on-screen, with optical character recognition

• Any word included in PowerPoint or Keynote slides, including speaker’s notes

• Any word included in any additional metadata, including titles, comments, notes, or uploaded video transcripts

Best of all, Panopto’s Smart Search timestamps your video content, enabling your team to instantly fast forward right to the exact moment they were searching for.

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2. List each step that a user must take to record a video and share it so it can be viewed by the intended audience.

There are two simple requirements for virtually every organizational video. First, it must be recorded. Second, it must be shared. While that may sound straightforward, many video platforms simply don’t support efficient video workflow — meaning what should be an easy process may end up requiring additional software, AV expertise, and a steep learning curve for new users.

Panopto is an end-to-end solution designed to make it simple for anyone to produce and share professional-quality video quickly. With Panopto, video workflow is easy:

• Panopto can be installed on any PC or Mac, and offers native ioS and Android mobile apps

• Users launch the recording software

• Panopto automatically recognizes all recording equipment available for use. Panopto opens with the same settings the user recorded with in their last session — if the user changes those settings, the new preferences will be saved for the next recording.

• Then, users just click “record” and present.

• once the presentation is over, users click “stop.”

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• If the user records while connected to the web, Panopto automatically uploads the video to their Panopto video library. If the user records offline, Panopto will automatically upload the video the next time the device is connected to the web.

• After uploading, Panopto automatically converts the video to be playable on any device (a process called “encoding”), and indexes the video content for search.

• Every video uploaded to a Panopto library is secure by default. Sharing a recording with additional viewers is a simple process.

For the user, video workflow with Panopto is simple: Click record, present, click stop. Panopto takes care of the rest.

3. Itemize the hardware required to record, stream, manage, and view videos.

Media production in the enterprise has traditionally required expensive, specialized hardware for recording, live streaming, and encoding video content. Scan converters and scalers were used to normalize media file formats. Suitcase-sized, real-time encoders were used for broadcasting video. Dedicated recording appliances were used to capture video for on-demand playback.

Similarly, enterprise-grade video cameras have traditionally been expensive and complex, requiring the expertise of an AV team.

Press Record Press StopPresent1 32

Panopto Handles Everything Else

Stores an archival copy

Synchronizes slides and video

Generates a table of contents

Webcasts your video and screen

Records all video sources

Uploads to your Panopto server

Transcodes for any device

Indexes all words spoken and shown

Sends an alert when video is ready

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In the last five to seven years, however, all of this has changed. Purpose-built video capture appliances have been replaced by commodity desktop and laptop computers. Smartphones, tablets, and laptop webcams can capture broadcast-quality HD video. And the cloud is increasingly used as a scalable resource for compute-heavy tasks such as live encoding.

Modern video platforms take advantage of these trends in hardware commoditization and cloud computing to reduce organizations’ AV capital expenditures, improve the scalability of video infrastructure, and simplify product maintenance and upgrades.

Panopto was built from the ground-up to leverage commodity hardware and work with any video camera or specialty recording device. Specifically:

The Panopto recording software runs on any Windows or Mac desktop or laptop.

Panopto tests and certifies the widest range of video cameras and recording devices, from USB webcams and consumer camcorders to document cams, smart whiteboards, IP cams, and professional video cameras.

Panopto’s server infrastructure can be hosted in the cloud or deployed on premises, and runs on commodity Wintel hardware.

native mobile apps for ioS and Android make it easy to capture and upload video from smartphones and tablets.

Visit our support site for a complete list of Panopto’s officially supported equipment.

4. List each step that a user must take to live stream a video presentation.

Live streaming video has traditionally been a great challenge for organizations. Broadcasting events, announcements, and even internal meetings in large organizations typically requires an AV team. Web conferencing software alone doesn’t offer an answer — scalability issues mean those tools cannot support the larger audiences most large organizations need to be able to reach.

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Webcasting offers a solution — the ability to live stream a presentation over the web, to an external or internal audience of thousands or even tens of thousands. But not every video platform offers webcasting as a standard feature, and even fewer include it as an option in the normal video workflow — meaning it can be hard for first-time users to find and take advantage of.

Panopto makes webcasting easy:

• open the Panopto recorder on any Windows PC

• Select recording settings as usual

• Check the “Record and Webcast” box on the top of the recorder window. Panopto will instantly generate a link you can share with your viewers.

• Then, just click record and present as usual.

Users can also schedule webcasts in advance by clicking “Webcast” on the Create menu in their Panopto video library.

5. How many video inputs can be simultaneously captured for events, presentations, and demonstrations?

Some ideas simply can’t be captured with a single viewpoint. Whether it’s a product or lab demonstration, a complex simulation, a keynote presentation, or any number of other potential uses, it’s helpful to have a video platform that can record more than one stream of video. not all platforms, however, can meet this need.

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Panopto makes it easy to record video from a virtually unlimited number of cameras or other video sources using your Windows PC. Capture video from USB webcams, professional video cameras, document cameras, or other digital and analog devices. Sync mobile video from smartphones and tablets. Even record multiple computer screens simultaneously. no matter the event, with Panopto you simple simply plug in your video sources, select them in Panopto, and click record. Panopto handles the rest.

For larger presentations where plugging every recording device into a single laptop isn’t a possibility — think corporate events, town hall meetings, big lecture halls, and other similarly large environments — Panopto has another answer: distributed recording. With distributed recording, there’s no need for the traditional conference AV setup of mixers, video signal converters, and hundreds of feet of cable. Just install Panopto on the presenter’s computer along with one or more other computers you can position anywhere else you’ll have a camera positioned. Then, just plug your video and audio recording equipment into the nearest laptop as usual.

With Panopto, each computer can stream its respective video feed to Panopto’s server, where they’re automatically synchronized and can be streamed to the viewer. Distributed recording can be used for live or on demand events and doesn’t even require that the video sources be located on the same network.

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6. Paste the link to documentation of your application programming interfaces (API) and the ability to customize the look and feel of your video portal.

Today, most organizations have developed their own custom workflows for managing video assets — from recording to editing to encoding. Without the ability to easily integrate into your existing workflows, any new video platform risks becoming “more work” for your team — and less likely to be used to its full potential.

Panopto is built to integrate with your organization’s content management systems (CMS), learning management systems (LMS), and identity providers. Included with Panopto are integration modules for popular LMSs, single sign-on support for Active Directory and SAML, and conformance to the Basic LTI and SCoRM standards. In addition, Panopto includes developer APIs for extending and customizing the video platform, which you can find on the API page of our support site.

Likewise, when your team does interact with 3rd-party software like a video portal, many organizations prefer to have the option to brand the tool with custom logos and colors. Panopto makes it easy to customize your video portal in 60 seconds — simply upload your logos, pick an accent color, and you’re done. You can see how it’s done on the custom branding page of our support site.

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7. List the elements of your video platform and specifically which are included in the core license price, and which features must be purchased as add-ons.

With any technology investment, total cost of ownership is a top-level concern. Too many vendors quote impressive offers, only to reveal later that anticipated features must be purchased as an add on or that new functionality requires new subscriptions. It’s a lack of transparency that makes budgeting anything but predictable.

Panopto is one product with one price. Included as standard in a Panopto License:

• Recording & Webcasting

• Live streaming (“Webcasting”)

• Multi-camera video capture

• Single- and multi-screen recording

• Schedulable, automated recording

• Sharing & Managing

• A complete, web-based video management system

• Video, folder, and viewer-level analytics

• Instant, automated video upload

• Automatic video transcoding

• A web-based video editor

• Simple branding customization capability

• Integrations for popular CMS and LMS solutions

• Developer APIs for extended video integration

• Search & Viewing

• The industry’s best video content search

• Dynamic video playback for any device

• native mobile apps and mobile-aware video encoding

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8. Document how your video platform protects against data center outages, as well as hardware and operating system failures during a recording or live event.

no provider, no server, and no data center is immune to outage in some form. not long ago, Amazon’s east coast data center outage was widely publicized after severe storms knocked out the primary and backup power generators — and brought down service from netflix, Pinterest, and Instagram. When bad things happen, whether it’s a power failure, a network outage, hardware crash, a blue screen, or a misbehaving driver, you should expect your video platform to have a plan in place to prevent failures.

Panopto protects our customers against data center outages and reduces the chance of data loss with a feature that called “cross-availability zone failover,” which involves the continual replication of our entire video platform across multiple data centers in different geographic locations and on different electrical grids.

For our customers, this means that as new recordings are created and uploaded to our servers, or as existing videos are imported into Panopto’s video content management system, we create copies of the files and all associated metadata, and keep them at the ready on a standby system. If at any point, connectivity to the primary system is interrupted, Panopto automatically redirects traffic to the standby

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system so that our customers will still be able to access their video library, view videos, record new content, do live broadcasts, and administer their systems. You can read more about our hosted architecture on our support site.

outages don’t just happen on servers. Local hardware and operating systems can fail during recordings or live broadcasts as well, for reasons ranging from kernel errors to tripped-over power cords. To protect against these “local outages,” Panopto’s “Failsafe Recording” feature:

• Automatically restores the recording or live broadcast as quickly as possible

• Automatically repairs the video files that were impacted by the outage

You can find out more about how Panopto helps to protect your video system from failure on our website.

9. Document how your video platform scales with the ongoing growth and spikes in user demand.

Video is only just reaching the tipping point in most organizations. Virtually every industry analyst expects the total amount of video organizations produce and consume will increase exponentially in the coming few years. That means any video solution you buy today will need to scale to meet your needs tomorrow.

With a video platform, scalability applies to a number of elements in the system, including: web servers which need to accommodate increasing HTTP requests, encoding servers which need to scale as more and more encoding jobs are submitted, and data scalability to accommodate a rapidly increasing amount of video storage.

Panopto is architected to enable each of these components as well as other elements of the platform to scale, both for customers deploying Panopto on-premises, as well as those running Panopto as a hosted service in the cloud. You can read more about Panopto’s network server topology and cloud hosting to dynamically scale your video platform on our website.

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10. List your native mobile apps that provide support for searching and viewing.

More and more people in every organization are using tablets and smartphones to view video. Bring your own device, flex time, work from home, and other modern working arrangements have made enabling mobile access to video absolutely essential.

Panopto has you covered. Every video uploaded into our video content management system is encoded for playback on mobile devices, and automatic device detection ensures viewers always get an experience tailored to their device.

Panopto also features native mobile apps for both ioS and Android, providing full support for your team to view, search, and record videos from anywhere.

• For more details on Panopto for iPhone and iPad, visit the iTunes Store.

• For more details on Panopto for Android, visit the Google Play Store.

With Panopto, you can carry your entire video library in your pocket.

+ Describe how your platform supports the protocols and caching architecture of Modern Streaming.

The video streaming industry is undergoing a sea change. As video has become a mainstream medium for business communication and learning, the approach to delivering video files has shifted from overlay networks, custom protocols and specialized servers to chunked, HTTP-based “Modern Streaming.”

What makes a video streaming protocol modern?

• Chunked delivery: With modern streaming, video files are divided into short multi-second segments that are more efficiently sent across the wire.

• httP communication: Video segments are sent across the internet or corporate WAn using the standard HTTP protocol, meaning they are more easily processed than those sent via custom protocols.

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• stateless interaction: When a client is watching a video stream, each request for subsequent video segments is independent of previous requests, meaning there’s no persistent connection between client and origin server.

• Cache-friendly: Chunked delivery works in concert with the HTTP caches that are ubiquitous on the internet, in content delivery networks (CDns), and in many corporate networks — creating major benefits for network bandwidth management and WAn optimization.

• adaptive-bitrate (aBr) playback: Videos are encoded at multiple quality levels. During playback, the client’s available bandwidth determines which quality level will provide the smoothest playback, and adjustments are made dynamically to minimize buffering.

• Passive network architecture: Intermediary nodes only route video fragments on the network toward their final destination. The intermediaries never execute any specialized code or modify the video fragments.

• internet-intranet symmetry: Modern protocols like HLS, DASH, Smooth, and HDS treat corporate WAns works no differently than the public internet. Both are passive, stateless networks that can route video chunks to their final destination and cache video segments as needed.

organizations that implement their live and on-demand video infrastructure using Modern Streaming stand to benefit from reductions in cost and network management complexity, and from improvements in scalability and the viewing experience. Because modern video protocols are built to leverage the architecture

Modern Streaming unifies the network transport to HTTP, providing a single, consistent caching infrastructure for improving the performance of video, images, documents, and other content.

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of the internet and corporate WAns, they work in concert with organizations’ existing web caching infrastructure and WAn optimization technologies.

For organizations with video infrastructure built on legacy streaming protocols like RTMP, MMS, and RTSP, and organizations that have invested in multicast video communication, Modern Streaming represents an inflection point. Continued investment in legacy video technology may limit near-term disruption, but will prolong the inevitable transition, increase the eventual cost of switching, and limit the choice of technology providers who are actively divesting from the technologies.

Panopto is the first video platform built from the ground-up for Modern Streaming. The Panopto video platform uses HLS for video capture, live streaming, and on-demand distribution, enabling organizations to efficiently deliver video using existing network infrastructure. named a “Leader” in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Video Content Management, Panopto is the ideal choice for IT organizations looking to future-proof their video investments.

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fill out a free trial form at panopto.com/free-trial/ or give us a call at 855.PanoPto

our team will contact you to discuss how you’d like to put video to work in your organization, and help you determine if Panopto would be a good fit

We’ll set up your video platform site with you that same day, help you brand it for your organization, and include a set of welcome and how-to videos for first-time users

from there, you’ll be ready to go! You’ll have complete access to upload existing videos, record new videos, share and view recordings, and search your videos for specific details

Get started in less than 1 day