PITTSBURGH, December 11 /PRNewswire/ --

Panopto, Inc. announced today that its CourseCast lecture-capture technology-developed and first implemented at Carnegie Mellon University-is being made available to qualified academic institutions free of charge.

CourseCast's easy-to-deploy lecture-capture technology enables educators to capture, edit, index, archive and stream video and audio over the Internet. CourseCast gives students on-demand access to indexed lectures and course material, enabling them to experience or revisit entire lectures, or to focus on segments of their choice. CourseCast is easily deployed using standard PCs and peripherals, which substantially drives down the cost of lecture-capture deployment.

Panopto has created the Socrates Project to distribute and develop its CourseCast technology to qualified institutions, including universities, colleges and K-12 schools. In exchange for free access to the CourseCast platform, Socrates members will participate in ongoing beta and developer programs aimed at continually enhancing the technology for all users.

William L. Scherlis, PhD, founding director of Carnegie Mellon University's PhD Program in Software Engineering and co-inventor of CourseCast, said, "CourseCast was developed at Carnegie Mellon and has become a great success. We have captured thousands of lectures and there have been more than 100,000 viewings to date. CourseCast is used by on-campus students, by disabled students, for distance education, and for many other purposes. The goal of the Socrates Project is to allow other academic institutions to deploy CourseCast, thus delivering on part of Panopto's charter to give back to academia."

Charter members of the Socrates Project include Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC's Institute for Clinical Research.

Nicholas Laudato, PhD, Associate Director, Instructional Technology, Center for Instructional Development and Distance Learning at the University of Pittsburgh, said, "What captured our attention about CourseCast was the technical architecture of the product and its potential for the future, particularly its flexibility and scalability. An important example of this is its simple web-based interface that allows lecturers to edit their recorded presentations, making multiple versions that target selected topics, without modifying the original content. For instance, instead of providing students with a link to a two-hour recording, which few will actually view, the instructor can create an instructional sequence and embed it in a course management system-such as Blackboard-by providing links to multiple extracted recordings interspersed with learning objectives, readings, and activities. It can accomplish this without the cost or cognitive overhead of high-end video editing applications, freeing the instructor from dependence on specialized technologists. CourseCast has the potential to do for streaming rich media content what Blackboard did for course web pages, that is, make it available to all faculty, regardless of their level of technical sophistication."

Sue Alman, PhD, Director of Distance Education at the University of Pittsburgh's School of Information Sciences, said, "We've been a very satisfied user of CourseCast for over a year now. The system is very capable and their (Panopto's) support has been exemplary. As a charter member of the Socrates Project our collaboration with Panopto has yielded real innovations in their product line and dramatically reduced our implementation costs in the process."

Beyond its low-cost ability to seamlessly capture critical content, Panopto's unique knowledge-management capabilities enable captured material to be easily searched, annotated, linked and safeguarded. These attributes give other potential users, such as corporations, ready access to rich content captured in meetings of all kinds, from the largest to the smallest design meetings, compliance reviews, brainstorming sessions and conferences.

Added Brad Winney, Panopto's President & CEO, "Longer term, we believe the collaborative development of this fast-growing technology in academia will help to drive the adoption of rich-content capture and knowledge management systems on a broader level. Indeed, commercial applications of the technology are in active development by Panopto."

About Panopto, Inc.

Panopto, Inc. is a privately held provider of rich-media knowledge casting and management solutions to the Education, Corporate, Government and Healthcare markets. The company's suite of systems and services capture, stream, edit and archive rich media content across the enterprise. More information about Panopto can be found at http://www.panopto.com.

Web site: http://www.panopto.com

Reid Gearhart, +1-914-734-1191, rhgnyc@optonline.net