ShareStream Announces Release of Version 5.0 of the ShareStream Rich Media Platform

Latest ShareStream Release Includes Revamped User Interface and Enhanced Ease-of-Use for Non-Administrative Users

GAITHERSBURG, Md.--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--ShareStream announced today the availability of v5.0 of the ShareStream Rich Media Platform, a major new release of the pioneering video content-management and delivery systems for education and training. Highlights of the release include a sleek, new user interface for ShareStream’s end-user facing web pages, more robust advanced-search functionality, as well as numerous performance and productivity enhancements.

“Rich media is poised to transform the way educational institutions and enterprises engage with traditional learners, distance learners, and the public at large”

With the advent of online video, audio, and podcasts, media is proliferating across university and college campuses, as well as enterprises, at a rapid rate. The ShareStream Rich Media Platform—a turnkey system for the full lifecycle of media, complete with digital rights management—is designed specifically to fulfill rising demand from faculty, administrators, and students for integrating rich media into online learning and research environments and university communications.

“Rich media is poised to transform the way educational institutions and enterprises engage with traditional learners, distance learners, and the public at large,” stated David Weinstein, ShareStream’s CEO. “ShareStream Version 5.0—which incorporates many of excellent insights and suggestions the company has received from our customers and prospective clients—arrives at an exciting juncture for the use of media in education to provide a complete solution that addresses the unique challenges educational institutions face in establishing a scalable, sustainable, and secure media service.”

The ShareStream Rich Media Platform—developed in collaboration with Georgetown University at its Sun Center of Excellence—provides educational institutions with a proven Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) media-management system for institution-wide media implementations, that serves a wide variety of user groups and departments across campuses.

Institutions of higher education are leveraging the ShareStream Rich Media Platform to fulfill a wide variety of use cases, including:

• Enhancing learning management systems (LMS) with an easy-to-use video solution for teaching and learning via ShareStream’s Connectors for all of the major LMSs, such as the ShareStream Rich Media Building Block™ for Blackboard Learn™
• Empowering institutions to build global online campuses through ShareStream’s online video platform for distance learning
• Enabling library staff to centrally store, manage, and preserve media collections and reserves through ShareStream’s video content management and delivery system for libraries
• Providing a state-of-the-art media destination site and media publishing tools for educational institutions public websites, to be better communicate internally and to the world at large.

New Functionality Introduced in ShareStream v5.0

• Revamped User Interface (UI) for ShareStream’s End-User Facing Web Pages and Additional Support for User and Student-Generated Content and Media Mashups: Previous releases of the ShareStream Rich Media Platform have proven the solution’s ability to scale for institution-wide usage and high-volumes of media delivery; to interoperate with organizations’ most important internal systems; and to fulfill organizations’ needs for controlling access to content and securing media during delivery through digital rights management (DRM). After successfully delivering a scalable, interoperable, and secure system, ShareStream’s research and development team have dedicated significant resources to enhancing the faculty, student, and end-user experience to optimize usability and ease-of-use for non-technical users, as well as provide additional support for user and student-generated content. ShareStream’s new end-user UI, a sleek and user-friendly media destination for playing, uploading, editing, tagging, browsing, and searching for media, complements MediaManager and MediaMigrator, the core administrative components of the ShareStream Rich Media Platform, to provide educational institutions and organizations with a comprehensive media platform for both media specialists and non-technical users.
• Enhanced Search and Discovery for Reusable Content: ShareStream enables organizations to consolidate multiple support-intensive “silos” of rich media content into an enterprise-class media system that allows organizations to achieve significant economies of scale and performance. As ShareStream is regularly used to store and manage vast collections of content, ShareStream v5.0 includes expanded metadata-driven search capability that allows users to efficiently search for, identify and reuse assets across institution-wide media implementations.
• Enhanced Upload Functionality that Supports Unlimited File Sizes for Uploads: ShareStream v5.0’s release of MediaMigrator—the component of the ShareStream Rich Media Platform that provides batch media upload and streamlined server-side transcoding—includes support for uploads of unlimited file size. This enhancement is particularly significant for media librarians seeking to ingest large, uncompressed media files into MediaManager while working on preservation, archiving and digital repository-projects.

Availability and Demonstrations

ShareStream, which offers its product as either a software-as-a-service (SaaS) or as an on-premises solution, is currently shipping ShareStream v5.0 to anchor customers, and will make the latest release commercially available in early-May 2011.

ShareStream will be demonstrating ShareStream v5.0, as well as ShareStream's New Building Block™ for Blackboard Learn ™ during a live webinar on Thursday, April 28^th. For more information on this event, including how to register and take advantage of the ShareStream “Spring Fling” sale, visit www.sharestream.com.

About ShareStream:

ShareStream provides secure, enterprise-wide rich-media management platforms and online video solutions designed specifically for the unique need of educational institutions. The ShareStream Rich Media Platform, developed in collaboration with higher education at Georgetown University, provides educational institutions with the technological tools specific to their workflow to allow them to operate as state-of-the-art educational media organizations to achieve the maximum benefit from their content, on campus and beyond. For more information, please visit www.sharestream.com.