- Enterprise IT/AV
What’s New in the November 2018 Panopto Update?
What’s New At a Glance:
Today, we’re pleased to announce some exciting updates to our video platform. The November 2018 Panopto update takes a big leap forward in analytics, providing administrators, trainers, communications teams and instructors an expanded reporting dashboard that will expose new audience and video content performance insights. We’re also happy to share we’ve updated the core user experience in our video content management system (video CMS), making it easier to navigate and discover videos. And for administrators, we’ve added a new IP security management feature to control user access to videos and folders. Plus, Moodle customers will find that our updated integration with user security groups will make video content administration much easier.
As usual, all existing Panopto customers will receive this update free of charge.
New analytics for better decision making
Just a few years ago, the biggest challenge many organizations faced with video was creating it at scale. Specifically, it was complex, costly, and time-consuming to produce high-quality recordings. But as the cost of professional and prosumer video hardware has dropped, and as video platforms like Panopto have streamlined the video production process, creating new videos is no longer the principle problem. In fact, in just the last 12 months, the number of new videos in the Panopto Cloud has more than doubled, growing more than 5 million recordings. With many of our customers managing thousands or tens of thousands of videos, the big challenge now is in understanding audience behavior, viewing trends, and content performance, and then using those insights to drive business decisions.
For administrators and content producers who want to better understand their audience and content, we’re rolling out a new video analytics suite. The new reporting dashboard combines big data on viewer behavior, video views, and content engagement, and presents this information with elegant new visualizations.
The suite features a number of new reports and heatmaps that make it easier to understand how your content is performing. This includes a new Subfolder Roll-up that makes it possible to track how viewers are engaging with collections of related content across your video library. For example, within organizations that catalog their videos by department, the Subfolder Roll-up allows you to track departmental video engagement. In the screenshot below, views of marketing videos are receiving about three times as many views as those from the finance department.
The Panopto analytics suite provides summary and detailed views of video content consumption and audience behavior broken down by “Views by Day” and “SubFolder Roll-up” views.
In addition, we’re providing new heatmap visualizations that track when (i.e. at which points in the video) and how (i.e. leaving comments and personal notes) viewers are engaging with a specific piece of content. For training teams, instructors and faculty, these heatmaps help identify which topics are of interest, which may be confusing, and which are perceived as important by viewers.
The spike in comments at 10 minutes indicates a topic of interest or confusion among viewers. The spike in personal notes at 22 minutes suggests an important topic that viewers have bookmarked for future reference.
In addition to the new reporting dashboard, businesses and universities can still get additional insights into their audience and video content through our integrations with Google Analytics and Hive Insights.
Improved navigation for better discovery
As part of our continuing effort to make videos easily discoverable and manageable, we’re introducing a new collapsible nav bar. The new nav minimizes the amount of on-screen space used by navigational elements and gives you more space to focus on your video content. As part of this update, we’ve reskinned our user interface with modern, material design elements.
The new navigation bar in collapsed mode lets you focus on your video content.
The nav bar also includes a new, resizable folder browser and system tray that can be pinned to remain in place based on user preference.
The new resizable folder tray makes it easy to navigate the folder tree.
Network Access Rules expand video security options
For administrators, we’ve added a new Network Access Rules feature that makes it easy to manage user access to videos and folders based on their network IP address. This new “IP whitelisting” capability enables administrators to specify a series of network IP addresses that can access Panopto, thereby blocking anyone attempting to access videos from other IP addresses.
Network Access Rules give administrators a new way to manage security by using IP address ranges.
Organizations who want to further lock down video content to only internal employees will find this new feature particularly compelling since it allows them to specify that only corporate WAN IP addresses can access Panopto.
Tighter Moodle category structure
Finally, this release of Panopto provides deeper integration with Moodle LMS. Specifically, we’ve tightly coupled Moodle category structure with Panopto video folders.
Moodle administrators and users will appreciate this tighter integration as it will provide a more seamless experience between the two solutions. In particular, better folder navigation in the Panopto folder tree, making finding and discovering the appropriate Moodle course folder in Panopto easy.
Try Panopto Today
If you’re interested to find out more about what’s new in this release of Panopto or about how our video platform can help your organization manage and stream video more efficiently, contact our team to schedule a demo and set up a free trial today.