The State University of New York (SUNY) Information Technology Exchange Center (ITEC) today announced its acquisition of the Ensemble Video platform. Ensemble Video will provide streamlined video content management and publishing capabilities throughout the nation’s largest comprehensive system of higher education.
As part of SUNY’s Shared Services initiative, ITEC will offer Ensemble Video to SUNY colleges and universities at a significantly discounted price, enabling on-campus and cross-campus sharing of digital assets, including learning, promotional, and professional development materials.
“SUNY campuses came to ITEC with the need for a quality video management solution that is easy to use, robust, flexible, cost effective, and compatible with existing applications and infrastructure,” says Mike Notarius, SUNY ITEC Chief Information Officer. “Ensemble will provide another tool for SUNY campuses to continue enhancements in instruction and research; and efficiencies in administrative functions for students, faculty, and staff.”
Ensemble Video will also provide the core streaming video infrastructure for Open SUNY, an enhanced online teaching and learning environment announced in March, slated to become the largest online institution in the country. Open SUNY will bring every online course offered at each SUNY campus onto a shared and comprehensive online environment, accessible to all of the system’s 468,000 students and 88,000 faculty members.
“We’re delighted SUNY has chosen the Ensemble Video platform,” says Andy Covell, founder and CEO of Symphony Video, the company that manufactures Ensemble Video. “The real beauty behind our solution for a large-scale statewide system like SUNY, is the marriage of power and simplicity. IT administrators can harness our flexible architecture to support any number of unique media management scenarios. At the same time, faculty and staff with limited training can navigate our intuitive interface, and utilize our powerful publishing options to deliver content to their LMS, class blog, and more.”
The SUNY Information Technology Exchange Center (ITEC) will host and support Ensemble Video for SUNY, allowing individual institutions to take advantage of shared services while reducing duplicate efforts and investments across the SUNY system. Individual institutions will have the option of hosting their own local media cache, to further increase efficiency.
Ensemble Video’s feature set will allow SUNY institutions to integrate with a wide range of course delivery platforms, publishing platforms, and video technologies. Online, blended, and mobile learning; Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs); Open Education Resources (OERs); and even traditional face-to-face classroom models rely heavily on new media. Administrative, IT, Professional Development, and Media operations also depend on an increasing flow of video content.
“Ensemble Video provides us with a platform to effectively share and deploy rich media content,” says Carey Hatch, SUNY Associate Provost for Academic Technologies. “Integrations with our learning management systems will allow faculty to easily utilize this content in their online courses, making the instruction more engaging and impactful.”
Ensemble Video’s robust infrastructure will enable nearly half a million SUNY students (as managed by SUNY institutions) to stream content over a wide range of devices and connection speeds – anytime, anywhere. More than 85,000 faculty and staff can easily upload any video format, and utilize Ensemble Video’s capable publishing interface to truly harness the power of video in education.
About Ensemble Video
Ensemble Video is a flexible online video platform that simplifies video management and delivers content to a variety of devices, over a myriad of networks. Ensemble Video enables hundreds of progressive organizations across the globe to accelerate learning, increase viewer engagement, improve knowledge sharing, and reduce the cost of doing business. Ensemble Video offers self-hosted, cloud-hosted, and multi-tenant deployments, and works in concert with a wide range of complementary video and web technologies to streamline video management and publishing. Learn more about our platform by visiting our website and find out how our customers use our software on our blog. For a free trial or demo, contact us and begin orchestrating your online video today!
About The State University of New York
The State University of New York (SUNY) 64 campus system is the largest comprehensive university system in the United States, educating approximately 468,000 students in more than 7,500 degree and certificate programs, and nearly 2 million in workforce and professional development programs. There are nearly 3 million SUNY alumni worldwide. To learn more about how SUNY creates opportunities for students and New York businesses, visit www.suny.edu. For more information on SUNY ITEC, visit the ITEC website. And find out about Open SUNY from the Open SUNY press release.