• Academic Technology

Our Commitment to Education and Business Continuity

March 10, 2020 By Eric Burns, CEO

As the reach of the coronavirus continues to widen, schools and businesses worldwide are planning for extended disruptions as they implement solutions to protect their students, faculty, and employees.  Organizations are quickly transitioning operations to online-first models and implementing new models of remote work and technology-assisted pedagogy at an unprecedented pace and scale. Decisions that once unfolded over the course of months are now being made in days.  Whatever role Panopto’s technology and cloud services can play in your organization’s response to this global challenge, our scalable platform and infrastructure are ready.

I write this message from Panopto’s headquarters in Seattle, Washington, where the United States’ first COVID-19 case emerged and the first regional outbreak began.  Global technology companies and major universities here have closed their doors and embarked on an uncertain experiment of moving their operations online. Panopto’s office in Hong Kong and our customers in Asia have been living in this new reality for months, and it is now worldwide.  As we’ve watched the amount of video Panopto streams to customers in Asia triple in just the last sixty days, I am humbled by the role that we are now called to play in helping the world’s institutions rise to the tremendous challenge that they face.

Panopto was founded with the mission to help anyone share knowledge using video.  Our thirteen-year pursuit of this mission has given us a unique responsibility to help anyone who depends on the exchange of knowledge and information find their footing in this new world of disruption.  Whether our customers are webcasting events and classes that would otherwise be held in person, recording and sharing lectures, meetings, and videos for students and employees, giving individuals a way to record videos of their own, or building a secure library of recordings to provide on-demand access, Panopto’s scalable infrastructure is ready.  Our global cloud infrastructure already operates at extraordinary scale, streaming over 164 million minutes of video to millions of viewers worldwide in January alone, and we are ready to help our customers do much more.

Live, interactive video will play an essential and complementary role in providing the real-time engagement that organizations will depend on as they adapt.  Zoom and technologies like it are the ideal tools for moving live interactions online; for those who miss these live meetings or events, whether due to geography or illness, Panopto will be an indispensable tool.  Hundreds of thousands of Panopto customers already use our integration with Zoom to share recordings of meetings and virtual classrooms, which are searchable and playable in Panopto.  To further support the use of Zoom as a ubiquitous platform for live interaction, Panopto is launching a new workflow that automatically captures recurring Zoom meetings and automatically shares them with their target audiences.  This is just one small way that we can make this transition less disruptive. We are eager to hear your suggestions for other ways we can support you and your organization as it adapts.

When Panopto spun out from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007, widespread use of video technology for learning and business communication seemed like the stuff of science fiction even to true believers like us.  We have worked hard to earn the trust of the world’s most demanding universities and global businesses, and our commitment to the missions of those we serve gives us the opportunity to help the world weather this storm. Panopto’s global team is standing by to assist, so please reach out to let us know how we can help.

Best wishes,

Eric Burns

CEO,  Panopto Inc.

 

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