Do you have online videos hosted on third-party websites such as YouTube, iTunes, Vimeo, etc. and wish they could all be found in one place – on a branded website within your domain name that will be automatically updated as soon as new videos are uploaded to the third-party websites?
Do you wish you could find a platform to invite your constituents (decentralized offices, faculty members, students and other campus community members) to submit video for you to review and use on this branded website?
Would you like such service to be free, easy to use and quick to implement?
Well, today is your lucky day, because I (with the help of the Duke team) found an open source web platform available for free (that will remain free if you choose to host your website on your server when the beta phase is over) that will do all of the above: Miro Community.
As hinted above, Duke University launched last month a website gathering all its online videos hosted on different online video sharing websites owned by different user accounts: Duke On Demand.
A couple of weeks ago, Ben Riseling, web operations manager, office of news and communications Meg McKee, program coordinator for Duke on Demand and Stephen Toback, senior manager, interactive technology services at Duke were kind enough to answer via email a few questions about this new service and its implementation.
1) Why did you decide to launch Duke on-demand? What problems were you trying to solve
As at many universities, video output at Duke has been growing rapidly over the past few years, and we also have a growing list of distribution channels such as YouTube, iTunes U, Futurity, BigThink and UStream. Michael Schoenfeld, Duke’s vice president of public affairs and government relations, asked us to produce a site that promoted all of these efforts in one place, and to tie it closely to the new Duke.edu website design. Essentially, we were hoping to create a higher-education version of popular video sites such as Hulu.
2) Can you tell us a bit more about the platform that powers Duke on Demand? Is it expensive
Duke on Demand uses open-source software developed by the Miro Community. The university’s main news and communications office, where we work, produces the site and organizes its content in collaboration with the central IT department, which provides technical expertise and support. Starting in February, we began a six-month pilot project to evaluate the systems, technology and approach.
Duke on Demand is an aggregator of video, not a publisher. It provides a user-friendly interface for viewing videos from our partners. The videos themselves are still hosted at these partner sites. This
approach provided us a scalable solution should our video requirements change in the future. We also didn’t need any additional hardware or support to run the site.
3) The site was launched just a few weeks ago. Can you tell us how it was received by the community? Any interesting traffic number or feedback?
We’ve received a lot of great feedback from across the university, and some key campus units, such as the alumni affairs office, have been highlighting it for their audiences. We’ve also been featuring the site on a new social media page we launched just a few days later. Since users can pull RSS feeds of the different categories of video, many units are starting to express interest in using these RSS feeds on their own websites.
We’ve just begun our outreach, and some of the reaction has been interesting. After we spoke with a group of arts communicators on campus, for example, one woman said that Duke on Demand inspires her to record more events for her department. Previously she would record the events but wasn’t sure how much they were watched. Duke on Demand now allows her videos to be seen and shared more widely. Since the RSS feeds refresh multiple times a day, once a department uploads the video to one of our distribution partners, the video can usually be promoted on Duke on Demand within a few hours. Our arts colleague joked that Duke on Demand is pushing her to do what she has had on her “to do” list for awhile, namely to start bringing a flip camera routinely to her department’s events on campus.
As you’d expect in the online world, the feedback can come very quickly. For example, we posted a video on a Monday about the 1000th game at Duke for our legendary Coach K. Our social media coordinator used the “Share This” link on Duke on Demand to share this video with Duke University’s Facebook page that same afternoon. By the next morning, there were 267 ‘likes’ and 38 comments on the Facebook post.
Want to know how easy it is to implement such a website?
Have a look at Higher Ed TV, a new website I’ve created in about 3 hours with the Miro Community platform. I’ll tell you more about this new project in a next post. In the meantime, feel free to explore and let me know what you think.
How does Miro pull in content from iTunes U? Because we have yet to be given access to YouTube’s .EDU platform, this is the only place we currently have our longer videos.
Great Scott! That’s a fantastic tool that I’m sure will get a lot of traction in Higher Education, depending on their pricing model. I can’t imagine a site like this costs very much to run, though.
This basically does what we coded from scratch using the Vimeo API . http://bit.ly/3547n8 It uses Vimeo’s “Channel” interface to serve up our videos in various different environments. We’ve been really happy with it so far and the entire thing just costs us $60 per year for a Pro account. Not too shabby for an entire video infrastructure.
From Miro’s site:
“At this time, hosted Miro Community sites are free for everyone. Basic hosted sites will always remain free to individuals and small non-profit organizations. Once out of beta we will announce a pricing and payment system for larger non-profits and corporations.”
What constitutes a “larger non-profit?” Surely they do not look at the university market and suggest we are all “small non-profit” organizations.
Great tool, but should we be roped in by setting up a site we become dependent upon and then get surprised by a pricing structure that may push the smaller colleges out of the market? I’d like to hear in your follow up article what assurances on pricing they may have given you or discussed to adequately compare it against other options and toolsets.
It would be useful for Miro to be upfront about anticipated costs — for large and small companies and schools. Again, no knock on what Duke has accomplished, but smaller colleges may not have the funding a Miro might require after they change offereings and pricing models down the road.
From what I read on the site, and through my experiences setting up a miro test site, many of the core features making “Duke on Demand” so great, are only available to “premium partners”.
When I sent a request to learn more about how my university could enable those features, the response was:
“We’re currently in beta and we’re working up to our 1.0 launch, at which point we’ll be offering a process for institutions to apply to be premium partners. In the meantime, I’d be happy to talk to you about how to fully utilize the basic version of the site…”
The basic version of the offering is still pretty cool, though. It looks promising.
I had the same questions about cost. According to the FAQs on http://tinyurl.com/25939nl, the self-hosted version is still free.
Is Miro Community free?
The software that runs Miro Community is free and open source and can be downloaded here. At the current time, we host free sites for the general public and small community groups you can set one up here. We are happy to discuss premium features and fully customized sites on a case by case basis, please email anne [at] pculture.org for details.