The Tipping Point: 2009 Education Video Year In Review

I’ve been quite pleased to see the growth in online video platforms in 2009 and the many more-traditional vendors taking the educational market more seriously. Ensemble Video, which started at Syracuse University before spinning off into a separate company, was an early innovator in creating a platform specifically for education. In 2009, Ensemble celebrated the 3.0 release of its Enterprise Video Content Management System, along with adding customers Pepperdine and Clemson Universities.

Ooyala and Brightcove have added schools such as DePaul University and the University of Oklahoma, respectively, while companies such as Twistage are making an explicit play to serve the education and nonprofit sector. Although 2009 certainly showed a promising boost in online platforms taking notice of the education market, there is still a long way to go.

In essence, 2009 was a transitional year for educational video, as it was for the online video industry as a whole. The big questions have finally moved from how to produce video to how to manage and publish video online. It’s a multiple-choice question, and there are more answers now than there were a year ago. But I argue that there still are not enough solutions.

INSERT FIGURE 5 HEREOne might see that as a problem or a deficit. I choose to see it as an opportunity, both for schools and for the industry. Educators have started looking beyond the worlds of Apple and YouTube in search of better control over all aspects of their video publishing cycle. Vendors are starting to step in with solutions, and the market is heating up. With more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau (www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/02statab/educ.pdf), there are a lot customers who need to be served—2009 was just the tip of the iceberg.

Ooyala Learns a Lesson from YouTube

Customers can now add YouTube videos directly and monitor their performance.

27 Apr 2010