Opencast Vs Mediasite and others

[Ivan]

Hi everyone, 

I am doing the research trying to figure out key differences between Opencast and turnkey solutions like Mediasite, Echo 360, Panopto etc. I have several questions and would appreciate any answers you might have.

1. What functionality does Opencast allow that turnkey solutions like Mediasite, Echo 360, Panopto etc. don't have? Are there any functions that are unique to Opencast? 

2. Is it harder to install Opencast than to install Mediasite, Echo 360, Panopto etc.? I mean to install, integrate with the hardware and teach the faculty to work with it.

3. Does Opencast allow to be more flexible on adding new functions whenever needed or on being more school and student centric?

4. Is it much cheaper to assemble a system with Opencast than to get a turnkey solution? 

5. Are there any pitfalls or difficulties when choosing a custom Opencast-based system vs a turnkey thing?

Thank you all in advance. 

[Stuart Phillipson]

Hi Ivan,

I’ve made an attempt at answering your questions below.

Best Regards

 

Stuart Phillipson | IT Services

J20 Sackville Street Building
University of Manchester
Manchester
M13 9PL
United Kingdom

e-mail: stuart.p...@manchester.ac.uk
Phone: 016130 60478

 

On 9 Oct 2015, at 21:57, Ivan <imar...@epiphan.com> wrote:

Hi everyone, 

I am doing the research trying to figure out key differences between Opencast and turnkey solutions like Mediasite, Echo 360, Panopto etc. I have several questions and would appreciate any answers you might have.

1. What functionality does Opencast allow that turnkey solutions like Mediasite, Echo 360, Panopto etc. don't have? Are there any functions that are unique to Opencast? 

In short, it allows any functionality that you are willing to develop, I think that’s Opencast’s ‘killer app’. For example we wanted full timetable and student enrolment integration. That didn’t exist in Opencast when we started using it, but we knew we could make it happen as long as we were willing to fund development time. Similarly, processing more than 400 hours of HD video a day wasn’t on the features list, but because Opencast is open source, we were pretty confident that we could make it do that. 

In a linked way, when things go wrong its open source nature means that you can get right in to the process of fixing things. If there is a high priority bug that affects you (as an institution), you don’t have to wait for an external vendor to look into the issue. As long as you have skilled staff you can get things fixed in very short spaces of time.

2. Is it harder to install Opencast than to install Mediasite, Echo 360, Panopto etc.? I mean to install, integrate with the hardware and teach the faculty to work with it.

There’s two aspects to this. I would say that it is harder to get working compared to an out of the box system. But where that pays off it the second part of your question, integration is made easier by having full access to the system (Opencast). I did see a talk recently by Leeds University who bought 250 Media Site systems, and the impression I got was that it had also taken them a substantial amount of effort to get their system up and running.

3. Does Opencast allow to be more flexible on adding new functions whenever needed or on being more school and student centric?

Yes, very much so. We have made a number of small adaptations which have allowed us to focus on making a system which meeting student / academic needs, rather than getting them to conform to the way the system works. This approach has been very popular with teaching staff as a small customisation can make a big difference to a user.

4. Is it much cheaper to assemble a system with Opencast than to get a turnkey solution? 

Based on our cost estimates, yes. Our hardware cost per room is about £1,000. If you take all the staff, contractors, servers, storage and every other expense of our system it works out somewhere between £3,000 to £3,500 per room for a fully customised system that meets every one of our needs exactly. I believe Media Site is between £8,000 to £12,000 which buys you a generic off the shelf system with no integration or local staffing costs. 

5. Are there any pitfalls or difficulties when choosing a custom Opencast-based system vs a turnkey thing?

The hardest thing to sell is the idea you will probably need some local staff with skills in dev-ops, java and some degree of AV knowledge. In the long run I am certain that this is lower cost than buying off the shelf, but commercial manufactures alway suggest that open source will cost you more than a commercial solution because of a need for skilled staff.

Thank you all in advance. 

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to matterhorn-use...@opencast.org.

[Rüdiger Rolf]

Hi Ivan,

just a few additions to what Stuart said:
- If you are only interested in a small Opencast installation on a single server - and not a enterprise installation that scales very well to any amount of recordings that you may want to upload - and you would be fine with RHEL, CentOS or Scientific Linux, you can have a working and usable installation of Opencast up and running in about 30 minutes. If somebody is willing to maintain a Ubuntu/Debian repository that would be possible there too.

- If you are only interested in such a smaller installation you for sure will not need developers on staff. But if you want to go with integration to LMS, LDAP, OAI-PMH, or whatever you should have somebody with linux administration knowledge on staff.

- You should not expect that such an video management system can run unattended. So you will need staff to maintain and updated the recorders in the classroom and to frequently update your servers (new Opencast releases come every 6 month) and you might encounter problems with your network and your storage when you deal with large recordings.

So in general I would expect that Opencast can compete with the turnkey products. We currently might miss the unique selling point, when it comes to features, but you have a system that you can rely on. You are not depending on decisions of the company that provides the software to you. So you don't have to accept it if they rise the prices for their licenses and if they don't integrate the feature that you really need, you are free to hire a developer that creates this piece of code for you.

Regards
Rüdiger


Am 12.10.15 um 11:38 schrieb Stuart Phillipson:

-- 
________________________________________________
Rüdiger Rolf, M.A.
Universität Osnabrück - Zentrum virtUOS
Heger-Tor-Wall 12, 49069 Osnabrück
Telefon: (0541) 969-6511 - Fax: (0541) 969-16511
E-Mail: rr...@uni-osnabrueck.de
Internet: www.virtuos.uni-osnabrueck.de

[Ivan]

Stuart, Rüdiger, 

Thank you so much for your answers, this is super helpful. I have a couple follow up questions:

1. How does the functionality of Opencast compare to that of Mediasite, Echo360 and Panopto? Most of the features seem to be present in all the systems, so I am wondering if there are some minor, but still important ones that Opencast is missing.
2. What does it actually take to develop a needed function or two? An integration? I mean, how much effort in hours/days/weeks should be put in? I’d love to hear couple examples.
3. Building on Opencast seems to be a smart solution, but I guess the school administration can be reluctant to take that path as more uncertainty is involved. With the turnkey vendor they will always have someone to blame if something goes wrong. Is that the right way to look at it? What’s your perspective?
4. Does Opencast have a lot of bugs? I know it's relative, so, again, relative to the turnkey systems.

      Thank you so much in advance.


Best, 

       Ivan Maryasin

kjk

[Rüdiger Rolf]

Hi Ivan,

see my answers inline.

Am 12.10.15 um 22:08 schrieb Ivan:

1. How does the functionality of Opencast compare to that of Mediasite, Echo360 and Panopto? Most of the features seem to be present in all the systems, so I am wondering if there are some minor, but still important ones that Opencast is missing.

Unlike Opencast the other systems are not publicly accessible for us. So it is quite hard for us to answer your questions. It is harder for Opencast to include features that are commercialy available, as we have to be careful that everything is campatible to our license.

The commercial systems can easily aquire new feature that are available as commercial modules. They can also quite easily aquire functionality from Opencast, as we have a commercial friendly open source license.

1. What does it actually take to develop a needed function or two? An integration? I mean, how much effort in hours/days/weeks should be put in? I’d love to hear couple examples.

What kind of function are you interested in? The effort depends on what funtions you would like to support? If you want 4K-compatibility, that might take you 30 minutes, as you simply need to change the encoding parameters. If you want chalkboard-handwriting recognition you might need some month to setup your algortithms for the handwriting character recognition software and a few days to make it a service that will supply this functionality to Opencast.
Opencast with the service orientated architecture and the OSGI design patterns for sure has a strong learning curve, when it comes to start your own service. But if you got the idea it probably will not be a great deal to add a new module to Opencast.

It is quite similar when it comes to the UIs. The player has a plugin archtecture that you probably can integrate new functions quite easy if you understood the structure.  The Admin UI has a little different architecture that the player. But if you are familiar with angular.js you will hopefuly see quite quickly how you can integrate new functions there.

1. Building on Opencast seems to be a smart solution, but I guess the school administration can be reluctant to take that path as more uncertainty is involved. With the turnkey vendor they will always have someone to blame if something goes wrong. Is that the right way to look at it? What’s your perspective?

As a community we are still waiting for companies to provide cloud hosted Opencast instances. Some companies claim that they can offer this or that they will soon start with such a service, but I have not seen anybody really actively promoting such a service. For sure there is a market for such a service.

In general Opencast is quite well prepared for a cloud service and I know that Harvard, ie. has some optimizations that they will contribute in the future to make it even more efficient.

1. Does Opencast have a lot of bugs? I know it's relative, so, again, relative to the turnkey systems.

You can find our bugs here:
https://opencast.jira.com
I don't know if the commercial systems that you want to compare us with have public bug trackers too.

In general Opencast in my opinion runs quite stable. Most of the universities I know have 90-95% success rates with their recordings. And I doubt that many of our competitors can handle the 400 recordings a day that Stuart mentioned.

Regards
Rüdiger

[Ivan Maryasin]

Rüdiger, 

Thank you so much for the insights, really appreciate it. Do you know by any chance if there is anyone in marketing for Opencast? I know it's just a not-for-profit initiative, but I was wondering if there is anyone there doing the website and some general blog posts.

 

Best regards, 

Ivan Maryasin

Marketing Manager / Epiphan Video 

imar...@epiphan.com mobile: +1 617-3199026 office: +1 613-454-5274 x2413 toll-free: +1 877-599-6581

[Rüdiger Rolf]

Hi Ivan,

well that person is actually me.

As you said, we are non-profit and don't have a marketing budget. I am an Opencast board member and the update of the opencast website and maintaining it is currently my job.

If you are looking for an representative for the project you should contact Olaf Schulte from ETH Zurich (sch...@id.ethz.ch), who is the chair of the Opencast board.

Regards
Rüdiger

Am 15.10.15 um 20:36 schrieb Ivan Maryasin: