The Panopto video streaming service that we use at Dominican provides for two major functions:

A location in the cloud to save and share recordings.
Software for making recordings that can then be uploaded to the Panopto cloud.

Once a recording has been uploaded to the Panopto cloud, it can be shared in various ways, examples of which include...

Exclusively to the students enrolled in a given class in Canvas.
By invitation from the creator of the recording sent to specific individuals.
As a podcast that can be subscribed to by a public audience.
Embedded in a web page.

Now, if you've used similar services, such as YouTube, Vimeo or the Canvas Media Tool, you may be asking yourself "Why should I bother with Panopto?" It's a fair question to ask. Reasons that you should seriously consider Panopto revolve largely around the fact that you are creating content in an academic environment. These include:

A powerful integration with Canvas:

You will see in the following tutorials that Panopto and Canvas work very well together. As an instructor, you'll not only be able to create recordings that are easily added to your courses, but you can also take advantage of additional features, such as incorporating quizzes into recordings; embedding the recordings into a course page; applying analytics to see who is watching or to determine at which point your audience typically stops viewing. Also, with a click, you can create a "video drop box" in your Canvas course where your students can submit recordings as part of an assignment.

Retention of Intellectual Property and Copyrights:

Did you know that the moment you upload a recording to Youtube, it becomes the property of Google, to do with as they like? The same goes for Vimeo and others services. For personal use, this may not be of concern to you. However, when creating presentations for use in a course - whether you are an instructor or a student - being able to retain the copyright on your material is no small matter.

Powerful search and notation capabilities

Recordings submitted to Panopto are immediately indexed allowing for a comprehensive way to search inside the content of your videos. You (and your audience) can search for any word that is spoken or shown in any video, and then fast forward to that moment. The search is comprised of two main components: Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) for finding spoken words and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for locating words that appear on screen, such as those found in a slide presentation.

In addition, viewers have the ability to make and save notes. As they watch a recording, viewer-created notes are timestamped and become links. Clicking on a note/link will advance the recording to the associated point in the recording. These notes are saved, are private to the person who has created them, and are accessible to that person whenever they access the recording again in the future.

Unlimited storage for everyone:

Our subscription to Panopto allows for unlimited storage in the cloud. As you begin creating recordings, it is good to know that you will never run into limitations on the number of recordings that you can have or limits on the running time of any given recording.