With Social Video Sizing, Serve Your Viewers What They’re Hungry For

The customer wanting to watch your stream on Insta does not want a horizontal video shoehorned into a vertical frame. The customer watching the horizontal version doesn't want the vertical slice with the same thing blurred out behind it to fill the frame. Each of those customers is hungry for that particular experience. It's your job to give your customers what they are hungry for.

Backward Design for Educational Video Production

Software developers are trained in accessibility issues for front-end development and basic concepts like labeling control elements and reporting state changes to assistive technology—screen-readers—are part of a professional developer's code testing procedures. Despite this progress, two very different forces are swirling with the potential to push back on the trend towards better technological inclusion of the disabled.

Personalization Is More Than What You Think It Can Be

With advances with generative AI, just-intime transcoding, SSAI stitching, and other streaming video tech stack components, companies like Infuse Video are demonstrating that the true vision of video personalization—changing the video content itself—is finally at hand.

An Impending Accessibility Backlash

Software developers are trained in accessibility issues for front-end development and basic concepts like labeling control elements and reporting state changes to assistive technology—screen-readers—are part of a professional developer's code testing procedures. Despite this progress, two very different forces are swirling with the potential to push back on the trend towards better technological inclusion of the disabled.

Follow-the-Presenter Tools for DIY Instructional Videos

Until fairly recently, if a teacher wanted to produce a DIY instructional video untethered to a fixed point in front of a camera, they'd need to remotely control either a pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) head or a multicamera switcher. With the arrival of competent and inexpensive facial recognition software, several consumer videoconferencing cameras now offer automatic framing to allow teachers or other presenters to move around a scene to better engage with viewers and interact with props and visual aids.

Why Aren’t You Streaming Your Live Event?

These days, the cost and technological barriers to live streaming are few are far between. Robert Reinhardt outlines some reasons why organizations may still hesitate to live stream their events, and he shows why these reasons are misguided. He breaks down the ways that even events with small budgets can still produce high-quality live streams.

Learning on YouTube

YouTube Player for Education is something to keep an eye on as it matures in 2023. I don't expect it to be a particularly disruptive technology, but it will prove a welcome way for teachers who are exceptionally on camera to augment their teaching salaries.

Teaching With Dante

A commonly used streaming media technology at schools, conference centers, and houses of worship is Dante (Digital Audio Network Through Ethernet). A Dante-enabled device can be plugged into a Dante network using a standard Category 5e or Category 6 network cable; the network connects devices using either 100Mbps or gigabit network switches, typically with Power over Ethernet (PoE) capabilities.

Everybody’s Streaming

While you were busy streaming, what you think of as "streaming" evolved in­to many different things. Today, what you do when "streaming" is but one small piece of the streaming world.

Gear for the HyFlex Teaching and Learning Space

The name of the game for designing a hybrid classroom or meeting space is balancing inclusivity of the remote and on-premise audiences that a colleague sometimes refers to as the "zoomers" and "roomers," respectively. Here's a look at some gear that can help you achieve that balance.

Help Others Stream

Those of us in the industry sometimes lose sight of the fact that billions of people around the world have never used the internet, much less connected on Zoom or watched The Mandalorian in 4K. Here's one way you can help streaming video reach those who don't have good connectivity.

Online Video Learning: Just as Good as In Person?

There's been a lot written about online educational video since the beginning of the pandemic, and the results are surprising, though far from conclusive.

How to Choose A Video Management System for Schools and Universities

So you need a new video management system (VMS) for your organization? Here are some suggestions for making sure your VMS doesn't compromise your school's or your students' data.

We're All Video Distributors Now

One of the unheralded shifts spurred on by the COVID pandemic has been an increase in the number and types of organizations that are creating and distributing their own video content.

Pandemic Mergers and Acquisitions in Educational Video

Three transactions from the last year illustrate how educational video providers are capitalizing on trends in streaming media, both specific to e-learning and more broadly

How to Design a Hybrid Classroom

In-person or virtual? It's no longer one or the other, and schools and universities need to have clear strategies for delivering hybrid education to their students.

Back to School with New Video Teaching Skills

Educators learned a lot about video learning over the last 18 months. With most schools reopening this fall, how do you integrate those new skills and techniques into the physical classroom?

Reaching the Global Classroom

China provides a particularly interesting global classroom case study, due to both its huge population size and the difficulty of operating in its networks.

When to Ditch the Webcam

I produce most of my live training with a webcam because the quality delta between a webcam and other options is negligible when presented in postage-stamp-sized videos. But what setup should you use for a really important conference or a call that will be distributed to many viewers live or on demand? That's where things get interesting.

Educational Video and Protecting Student Rights

Both student privacy and accessibility need to be considered by any school, college, or university that's using video for education.