The MediaCore blog

It’s the start of 2012 and we’d like to send out a big New Year’s greeting to all of our customers. This year is going to be a big one for the online video industry and we’re really excited to see how things will develop throughout the year.

In retrospect, we saw huge moves last year in the video space. In September of 2011, comScore reported that 182 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content for an average of 19.5 hours per viewer (1). The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in 39.8 billion video views and the online video platform market as a whole increased by 40% year on year. Numbers like these are pretty jaw dropping and it’s plain to see that now more than ever both consumers and companies are hugely engaging with online video (2).

Looking forwards to 2012, we thought we’d pull together a few predictions for things that we think will be big: Read the rest of this entry »

We’re proud to announce that we’ve received an Impact Infused Award from the Impact Entrepreneurship Group and Deloitte & Touche L.L.P. Along with 10 other Canadian Startups, MediaCore was selected to be inaugurated into the Infused program. This program pairs startups with experts in the industry and provides them with resources and exposure to increase business in the future.

We think this is a wonderful way to end a great year and we’d like to wish everyone a great holiday season and a happy new year!

-The MediaCore Team

It is now possible to automate sending large numbers of audio or video files to MediaCore via our bulk upload API. This new API is the first part of our coming REST API, which will allow much deeper integration with MediaCore.

Currently the API allows developers to create media items, upload multiple files, add metadata (such as titles, descriptions and categories) and never have to worry about the details of encoding.

For more information please see our new documentation on this here:
http://mediacore.com/docs/upload_api.html

To provide an example of how to upload video or audio to MediaCore via the API we’ve created a simple uploader written in Python that can be run on any Mac, Linux or Windows computer that has Python installed.

You can download this uploader and give it a try yourself here:
http://mediacore.com/docs/mcoreuploader.html

We’ve been really listening to our customers over the past few months, and one of our most frequently asked questions is whether it’s possible to use MediaCore to create a private video site where users have to log-in to see content. We’re happy to announce that the future is now, and that we’re introducing a set of features that we think will make MediaCore an incredibly powerful tool for organizations who wish to distribute video or audio content securely.

Here’s a brief overview of each new feature and what it does. You can find these options now under your ‘Site Settings’ via the administrative menu.

1. Security – Provides the ability to define roles and permissions for users. Here you can edit and change what users who are not logged in can view, what people who have logged in can view, or define your own roles and permissions to match your organizations needs. By default we have included roles for the general public, registered users, administrators and managers. Roles can be assigned to individual users via the ‘Users’ menu option.
2. Users –  Provides the ability to email invite users to your site. You can invite a new user, customize their invitation message, and choose what role they will have, and which group they belong to.
3. Groups - Using groups it’s possible to create levels of access within your site to specific content. A group can contain an unlimited number of users, and is used to limit who can view your content.
4. Who can see this video - When you add media you will now see an option for ‘Who can see this video’ where you can choose either public access, registered users only, or choose a custom group. If you choose a custom group, access is restricted only to users who log in and are members of that group.

To see a video of all of these great new features in action, have a gander below:

We’re excited to roll out a completely overhauled administrative panel with literally hundreds of improvements ranging from performance tweaks and usability enhancements to advanced site security and group management controls.

Here’s the big list of all the things we’ve tweaked and improved in this release:

• Improved performance throughout the administrative panel. Load times should now have a nice 10-20% reduction as we’ve cleaned up javascript and consolidated a number of things within our code.
• Improved and unified the look and feel throughout the entire administrative panel. All screens are now much more consistent and we’ve simplified a lot of the language to make things intuitive. The Site Settings interface has been hugely improved in this regard. Other screens that have been hugely improved include the library, podcasts, and comments.
• Improved help throughout the app. On almost every major screen throughout the application we have written support documentation to explain what the various features on the page are an how they work.
• Added site security, users and groups to the Site Settings interface. It’s now possible to completely control who has access to content within your site.
• Added autocomplete to tags to make it possible to add tags without having to remember which tags you’ve added in the past
• Added multi-format video downloads for users by allowing them to click the “download” button and choose from a variety of file formats including the original file download.
• Added iTunes U support to podcasts so that Universities and Colleges can easily get their content into iTunes U. See our post on iTunes U support.

Probably one of the most noticeable changes in this release is the newly revamped “Add Media” interface which builds upon past improvements letting you upload your media faster with less confusion. We’ve taken the new unified window approach across the entire app and consolidated many of the various interfaces into single window menus.

We’re rolling out these new feature to all users immediately, so get out there, try em’ out and let us know what you think!

Starting today MediaCore will be the first online media platform to make it possible for colleges and universities to create podcasts for distribution within iTunes U. Currently many universities are using iTunes U, but there are no intuitive online tools for publishing directly to iTunes, and that’s something we’re going to change. We’ve been working hard on a streamlined publishing process for managing a single podcast or multiple podcasts and we’re pleased to now be announcing it’s availability to all customers.

If you’re into podcasting you can use MediaCore to create a podcast, upload episodes, automatically generate all RSS feeds, and deliver your video or audio content via our insanely fast global content delivery network.

If you already have a MediaCore account and you’re wondering how to create a podcast for distribution specifically for iTunes U, here’s the detailed how-to:

1.  Login to the administration panel, and choose the podcast tab
2. Next, hit the create a podcast button at the top left of the screen
3. Fill in the details about your podcast, and then proceed to add the relevant iTunes U category (ex. Biology)
4. Hit publish and you’re done! We’ll automatically generate all the iTunes U RSS for each podcast you create.

Once you have created a podcast, the next step is to add an episode to the podcast. To do this, click the “Add Episode” to the left of the newly listed podcast.

Below details how to add a podcast episode to your iTunes U podcast.

Optionally, you can choose to assign a particular episode to the same iTunes U category as the podcast, or alternatively choose another iTunes U category by clicking “iTunes U” under “Advanced” and selecting a new category for the particular podcast episode. You will be able to select any one of the standard iTunes U categories from this drop-down menu.

Lastly, we’ve made MediaCore work with both public and private feeds within iTunes U making it possible to distribute content via a university’s public or private iTunes U account.

We’re proud to have some of terrific companies and organizations using the MediaCore Platform, and starting this week we’d like to begin the first of many customer showcases.

Sprinkle Lab is a commercial filmmaking studio in San Francisco and they’re using MediaCore to present their own video site highlighting some terrific interviews with great minds like Eric Ries (Founder, The Lean Startup), Craig Newmark (Founder, Craigslist), Steve Blank (Serial Entrepreneur), and MG Siegler (Editor, TechCrunch).

Here’s a few words from them on this new series:

“It’s called Now I Know, and we’re really proud of it. We got to sit down with some incredible minds in the tech industry and talk to them about their experiences, failures and lessons learned. We’ve already interviewed some great people, but this is just the beginning!”

— Cameron Woodward, Co-Founder

Check it out: http://nowiknow.sprinklelab.com

Having had the opportunity to watch a few of these compelling videos in our office we’ve quickly become great fans of their work and what they are doing to help the startup community. If you like bite sized pieces of inspiration this is the place to go.