Screencast.com Update
We completed our rolling update this morning and I'm happy to report that everything went as planned. The improvements I spoke of in my last post are live and we're looking for feedback on what everyone thinks. Next week we will be starting the planning process for our next series of development sprints which will focus on online analytics packages and one of the most requested enhancements to date: Subfolders.
In the meantime, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on public vs. private content. Screencast.com has always kept your content exactly where you wanted it - secured by a password or in an authenticated folder or playlist, or in your publicly-visible Library, folder or playlist. While it's possible for someone to "stumble" onto your public content, we don't do anything to promote your public content with search engines. In fact, we do everything we can to prevent search engines from crawling through the system and indexing content. This is partly by design since Pro account users pay for the bandwidth that's used when their content is consumed. It seemed disingenuous to us to openly promote content only to then ask you to pay for the cost of popularity. However, many of you are asking for help in getting your content "found", and it would be relatively easy for us to assist content owners in the process of exposing their public content to the myriad of search engines that are out there these days.
So, what do you think? A lot of you have indicated that you want your content to be found and consumed. Why else would you have created it in the first place? However, increased exposure of your content could have consequences depending on how popular it becomes. I'd like to hear from you all on the subject. Feel free to post comments or send me your feedback.
Happy Screencasting!
Dirk Frazier
Product Manager
Screencast.com
Dirk,
We (Thermwood Corporation) have a fairly substantial library of Camtasia videos posted in authenticated folders and public folders. We offer the videos in the authenticated folders to our customers on a subscription basis and essentially using Screencast.com as a Digital Rights Manager without all of the capabilities of a DRM product.
There are a couple of things that would be extremely helpful and are needed for this to work better for us. One would be to have a method of indexing our accepted and unaccepted invitations. We are manually managing the subscription periods, but the invitations appear to be currently sorted chronologicly or appended as they are accepted. We need to be able to sort this field and it would be much more helpfull if it contained the person's name, since you have that info when they register.
Secondly, I have several authenticated folders. When someone purchases our product we have to send an invitation for each authenticated folder. The folders are quite helpfull at organizing the files into managable chunks, but the adminstration process of sending an invitation or cancelling an invitation is multiplied by the number of folders we are granting access to. For the most part, there are currently five folders that the customer is getting an invite to. We would like to have an authenticated folder with sub-folders. The parent folder would control the authentication.
Third, one of the reasons this is important is that we are going to be promoting our videos and changing our subscription period and pricing. One of our public videos has been viewed nearly 4,000 times. I do expect our sales to increase with our new offer, maybe not to 4,000 times each, but it is certainly possible. Thus, we need further assistance in being able to manage our subscribers and reduce the administrative steps to grant them access.
Your help and response would be appreciated.
Dennis L. Englert
Manager of Product Training
Thermwood Corporation
In regards to search engine visibility, I think the ideal scenario would be to add the functionality of search engine visibility, however have the feature turned off by default and have a check box to turn it on per video.
Not sure if this is feasible, or if this could indeed be managed this way, but thought I'd offer my 2 cents!
Keep up the good work!
-jeff
@Dennis - Thank you very much for the feedback. I like your invitation management suggestions and I want you and others to know that we are getting ready to take a look at better organization of folders and playlists, which should address your second point. I'll keep you posted as we progress.
@Jeff - Thanks as well. I'm also hoping that we can implement something along these lines, as I think it does make sense.
Keep the feedback coming!
Dirk
It would be reat to be able to issue specific passwords for individuals so we can control viewing at an indivudal level and trun content off and on for each individual. Thanks for a great product - I love screencast and its sharing capabilities and I am sure it will get even better
Make an option for uploading a public "version" of each original kept
just like it is now. No changes, just add a public area.
The largest upload bill goes to the lucky popular winner who should be
more than able to pay for the exposure with increased business.
If you have the biggest house in the neighborhood, who gets the biggest
electric bill? Okay then.
Screencast.com is a great platform to run online training from, and I see that other people are already doing this too. It would add value to me if Screencast.com provided the complete training solution - all except developing the content in the first place of course!
I'd like to see....
- Individual login names / passwords for secure content
- Date of last login by name
- Which videos have been viewed by name
- Training duration / availability control
- Payment taking facilities: 1) full payment and 2) monthly subscription
I hope this is of value to your product design phase.
Make the best even better!
Kim Kendall
Kendall-IT ACT! Specialists
Kim - I second all of your recommendations. Not having them means I cannot leverage and control participation or learning outcomes. Thanks for your suggestions! Andre
@thriftgirl62 - I like the concept of a "public area" in the sense that it represents a broader collection of content made intentionally public by content owners - a kind of community area if you will. That's an intriguing idea...thank you!
@Kim and @Andre - Thank you for the feedback. These are all great ideas, some of which we are actively researching for future release. We've heard a handful of users request some method of revenue generation, but it's not as widely requested as I would have thought, given the economic times we're living in. I'd be interested to hear from more people on the subject of content monetization.
Dirk Frazier
A couple of enhancements that are very useful:
I would like to hide any additional content on screencast next to the video. Viewers should have a seamless video experience without the need to explore other functionalies such as toolbars, download buttons etc. if not particularly requested.
A few things I would like to see:
- LDAP authentication so if someone has built a website with authentication and they are embedding the content for subscribers then they don't have to have another username / password combo.
- If you allow indexing then I would make it off by default with the ability to enable indexing per video / folder. For us, all of the content we store and plan to store is private and we don't want it indexed.
Thank you!
Bob Penland