Wednesday, April 29, 2020

What’s the Difference Between Kaltura, Panopto and Zoom?



Emporia State has licensed three video products from many years, starting with Panopto in 2008, followed by Kaltura in 2014 and Zoom in 2016. Each product is intended for very particular verticals but are now beginning to expand their portfolio to include features that overlap with one another. Video is extraordinarily popular at ESU. In any given month several terabytes of video are captured and replayed. Canvas is not well suited to support that much video content, so we direct users to one of these other solutions.

Panopto (Ancient Greek for All Seeing) was originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University as a lecture-capture product used in medical schools. It is the workhorse for recording and uploading didactic presentations that are replayed later for review and study – mostly PowerPoint and web sites with a video insert. Panopto is unique in that it is one of the few products in its class that supports two cameras. ESU first adopted Panopto to be used in the Earl Center for recording counseling sessions. Later, it was rolled out across campus into every Learning Space and every office. Faculty can even record at home. Like all our products, Panopto is mobile friendly and provides automatic closed captioning. Panopto can also be used for live broadcasting events. It is not a product that is intended for synchronous web-conferencing.

Kaltura is the granddaddy of video hosting and streaming. It is used by many major corporations and universities, including the University of Washington, KU, and Indiana University. Think of Kaltura as a YouTube for the university but used primarily used for academics. ESU adopted Kaltura because Panopto did not afford video upload from non-Panopto sources at the time we conducted a review. (That since has changed.) Kaltura’s vertical is serving video content through Canvas and through a public facing portal called Kaltura Media Space. It also includes a desktop capture utility called Kaltura Capture that offers native screen recording. Kaltura also supports some of our best accessibility features using an add-in called Reach that not only captions, but also provides an automatic transcript of the video dialog that can be downloaded and printed. Kaltura is attempting to broaden its portfolio into lecture capture and web-conferencing. Kaltura Mobile allows faculty to capture and upload video from  their smartphones directly onto Canvas.

Zoom is the latest entrant to our portfolio. Zoom replaced Adobe Connect a few years ago when we saw Flash being deprecated by the browser vendors. This product’s primary vertical is web-conferencing, although it is commonly used for all manner of lecture capture given its ease of use. Our license for Zoom is underwritten by KanREN – our campus Internet provider. Zoom recordings are stored on Zoom Cloud for 60 days, and simultaneously stored on Kaltura using a product integration. Zoom is perhaps one of our more popular products given its ‘frictionless’ product interface. In a typical month we will see upward of 600 Zoom meetings. Zoom can even be used for desktop capture recordings. It is perhaps the most versatile of the products we license, but the storage limitations provide challenges.


Rob Gibson
Director
Learning Technologies