video

A technical case study into how we developed the new Planetizen Video Courses platform using Drupal 7 and Brightcove Cloud video hosting to deliver affordable online education to professionals in the urban planning, architecture, and related professions.

At Urban Insight, we use web conferencing to facilitate collaboration between team members working in different locations as well as to communicate with our clients around the country. The critical features we need are 1) screen-sharing; 2) integrated audio over telephone or via the computer's microphone and; 3) the ability to schedule meetings and invite attendees.

While Skype is fine for quick internal meetings, for client meetings & web presentations, we have been using GoToMeeting for several years. We recently re-evaluated two web conferencing alternatives and compared them with GoToMeeting (GTM) to see if we wanted to change tools. 

At Urban Insight, the Kaltura video platform is one of our favorite video hosting services because it has excellent support for mobile devices. Uploaded videos can be converted to mobile format, and when Kaltura code is embedded in a site, videos play nicely on virtually any mobile device. Unfortunately, the Kaltura Drupal module does not currently provide effortless support for the Kaltura HTML5 player feature.

"Help!" wrote a friend of mine last week. "I was given these great videos of my clinic from a TV network, and I can't figure out how to get them on my website!" My friend runs a free clinic, and they received a lot of great coverage from the local news but they delivered a strange file that no one knew what to do with.