Panopto: The Video Platform for Businesses and Universities

Panopto, a Seattle, WA-based company was founded in 2007 as a Carnegie Mellon University tech spinout, with a belief that video can have a transformative effect on learning. Following their belief, the company has built a video platform for businesses and universities to improve the way they train, teach, and transfer knowledge. While, businesses leverage the platform to create video presentations, record instructor-led training, onboard new hires, and manage all of their video learning content, the universities use it to manage all of their video assets, integrating video into their Learning Management Systems (LMS), capturing lectures, recording flipped classroom videos, and more.

Panopto’s video platform makes it easy to manage, live stream, record, and share videos across organization. The videos can be edited, integrated onto websites and corporate YouTube, customized, and analyzed. The platform allows users to search by keyword within videos and find a timeline with the information they need. The users can test their comprehension with the built in support for quiz. "Interactive video helps people retain information by applying concepts that they've just learned," said Eric Burns, CEO, Panopto.

Panopto's HTML5-based video editor enables users to create custom preview images, add slide decks to existing video recordings, and synchronize individual slides within the video timeline.

The platform is inter-linked via a web-based content management system, a web-based media editor, in-built search engine, and developer APIs for integrating Panopto with existing Content Management Systems (CMS), LMS, and enterprise portals without requiring a proprietary hardware. For example, it supports a free Moodle integration bringing video directly to the Moodle interface that can be accessed without leaving the LMS. Instructors can add and manage their video files inside the Moodle course pages. In addition, each live webcast and on-demand recording can be linked or embedded as Moodle classroom news forum, where students can watch the lectures on any laptop or mobile device.

International telecommunications giant, Qualcomm, has been training thousands of employees for specialized skills, which requires a lot of experienced trainers to pass on the company’s technical information. “Panopto helped us to ensure our recordings would be resources our people could go back to, instantly find the information they need, and get back to solving the task at hand.” says Dana Sanderlin, Director of Product Management at Qualcomm. By adopting Panopto’s solution, Qualcomm has not only archived all of their training sessions but also reduced the cost of hiring professional trainers resulting in high ROI. Depending on the type of industry, Panopto can be tailored to improve employee training and knowledge sharing.

As video replaces documents, it will ultimately make video libraries as pervasive as video conferencing, enabling organizations to preserve their company culture and tribal knowledge. Looking to the future, the company plans on blending its asset management platform with video production companies to integrate Panopto’s software solutions that can enhance their current capabilities for production and increase productivity.