PITTSBURGH, December 11 /PRNewswire/ --

Panopto, Inc. announced today that its CourseCast lecture-capture
technology-developed and first implemented at Carnegie Mellon University-is
being made available to qualified academic institutions free of charge.

CourseCast's easy-to-deploy lecture-capture technology enables educators
to capture, edit, index, archive and stream video and audio over the
Internet. CourseCast gives students on-demand access to indexed lectures and
course material, enabling them to experience or revisit entire lectures, or
to focus on segments of their choice. CourseCast is easily deployed using
standard PCs and peripherals, which substantially drives down the cost of
lecture-capture deployment.

Panopto has created the Socrates Project to distribute and develop its
CourseCast technology to qualified institutions, including universities,
colleges and K-12 schools. In exchange for free access to the CourseCast
platform, Socrates members will participate in ongoing beta and developer
programs aimed at continually enhancing the technology for all users.

William L. Scherlis, PhD, founding director of Carnegie Mellon
University's PhD Program in Software Engineering and co-inventor of
CourseCast, said, "CourseCast was developed at Carnegie Mellon and has become
a great success. We have captured thousands of lectures and there have been
more than 100,000 viewings to date. CourseCast is used by on-campus students,
by disabled students, for distance education, and for many other purposes.
The goal of the Socrates Project is to allow other academic institutions to
deploy CourseCast, thus delivering on part of Panopto's charter to give back
to academia."

Charter members of the Socrates Project include Carnegie Mellon
University, the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC's Institute for Clinical
Research.

Nicholas Laudato, PhD, Associate Director, Instructional Technology,
Center for Instructional Development and Distance Learning at the University
of Pittsburgh, said, "What captured our attention about CourseCast was the
technical architecture of the product and its potential for the future,
particularly its flexibility and scalability. An important example of this is
its simple web-based interface that allows lecturers to edit their recorded
presentations, making multiple versions that target selected topics, without
modifying the original content. For instance, instead of providing students
with a link to a two-hour recording, which few will actually view, the
instructor can create an instructional sequence and embed it in a course
management system-such as Blackboard-by providing links to multiple extracted
recordings interspersed with learning objectives, readings, and activities.
It can accomplish this without the cost or cognitive overhead of high-end
video editing applications, freeing the instructor from dependence on
specialized technologists. CourseCast has the potential to do for streaming
rich media content what Blackboard did for course web pages, that is, make it
available to all faculty, regardless of their level of technical
sophistication."

Sue Alman, PhD, Director of Distance Education at the University of
Pittsburgh's School of Information Sciences, said, "We've been a very
satisfied user of CourseCast for over a year now. The system is very capable
and their (Panopto's) support has been exemplary. As a charter member of the
Socrates Project our collaboration with Panopto has yielded real innovations
in their product line and dramatically reduced our implementation costs in
the process."

Beyond its low-cost ability to seamlessly capture critical content,
Panopto's unique knowledge-management capabilities enable captured material
to be easily searched, annotated, linked and safeguarded. These attributes
give other potential users, such as corporations, ready access to rich
content captured in meetings of all kinds, from the largest to the smallest
design meetings, compliance reviews, brainstorming sessions and conferences.

Added Brad Winney, Panopto's President & CEO, "Longer term, we believe
the collaborative development of this fast-growing technology in academia
will help to drive the adoption of rich-content capture and knowledge
management systems on a broader level. Indeed, commercial applications of the
technology are in active development by Panopto."

About Panopto, Inc.

Panopto, Inc. is a privately held provider of rich-media knowledge
casting and management solutions to the Education, Corporate, Government and
Healthcare markets. The company's suite of systems and services capture,
stream, edit and archive rich media content across the enterprise. More
information about Panopto can be found at http://www.panopto.com.

Web site: http://www.panopto.com