Matterhorn and My Organization

Now that you have gotten to know Matterhorn, you may be contemplating how your institution could benefit from implementing it. Opencast Matterhorn is a collaborative effort, developed by a consortium of academic institutions with guidance from a larger community of academic institutions - but does it actually meet your needs and expectations?

We invested quite some time in requirement gathering and customer research to make Matterhorn a video management system that matches the needs of many institutions.

An entry into lecture recording

Matterhorn is designed to simply accomplish all relevant functionality related to the production, the management and the distribution of lecture recording. We are developing

• reference capture agents to be installed in the classroom, recording VGA, audio and video,
• a scheduling service to set up the devices for re-occurring or individual recordings,
• an ingest service to manually upload audio or video files,
• a processing service to analyze media and to manage the overall system,
• distribution services with standardized distribution channels, and
• an engage UI to provide additional features while consuming the video.

As a whole, this covers a typical "podcast service" and will allow you to easily make a first move towards lecture recording. Take a look at the functionalities in detail.

Podcasting already, but need to increase efficiency and productivity

The majority of institutions we talked to have a productive podcasting program already - but are less efficient than they would like it to be, and poorly situated to scale in response to the growing demand for lecture recordings and handling of media objects for the future. This scenario describes "the cobbler", the primary customer for who Matterhorn 1.0 is focused.

Instead of working with a variety of tools and programs to produce and distribute content, Matterhorn will offer all relevant functionalities as a integrated whole. This reduces the amount of manual work needed to shepherd media objects across various sub-systems, thus increasing productivity and reliability. And as Matterhorn also allows for customization, you will likely still be able to integrate those parts of your workflow that drove you to your current non-integrated configuration. This is the benefit of "maximizing reuse" of Matterhorn services.

Looking for an alternative to commercial lecture recording system

Various vendors offer universities and their students the opportunity to "rewind, relive and reconnect with the classroom experience" (Echo 360) and to "generate affordable knowledge catalogs you can search and secure" (MediaSite) and some certainly do this well. However, beyond fundamental issues around Open vs. Closed Source solutions, these systems are also limiting at least in two major areas of concern.

1. The ability to customize to your needs
   While we initially described lecture recording as a rather simple produce-manage-distribute process, we know from our own experience and the customer research we did that the devil is in the details: Any institution has particular needs and requirements - be it a Solaris infrastructure to run your system on or the wish to integrate existing capture hardware. Unlike most commercial systems, Matterhorn allows you to customize to these needs, be that by running selected services only or by adding functionalities you need.
2. Commercial systems come with a licensing model
   Whether based on the number of capture devices used or the number of (concurrent) users, commercial systems come with licensing fees. This implies that you cannot scale without additional fees - the more successful your service becomes, the more you have to invest. With an Open Source system like Matterhorn, you can actually benefit from economies of scale instead. Developed with automation in mind, the cost of running Matterhorn will actually decrease per course being recorded.

Hoping to find additional services to an existing system

Service-oriented architecture is the guiding principle in Matterhorn and offers the flexibility to implement only the functionalities you need. This is a huge advantage for those looking for an addition to or an extension of your existing system instead of replacing an entire system. Whether it's the ingest service or the media analysis to OCR slides, most Matterhorn services come with a REST-style interface, so that they can be easily accessed from any sort of system, platforms and computer languages. This gives you all the flexibility you need to enrich your existing system with Matterhorn services - thus taking advantage of the mere essence of SOA, re-using the services Matterhorn provides.

Considering Matterhorn as a strategic alternative to flying solo

Having established a system to meet your needs means that you invested time, money, and resources - and ideally you are happy with that system. This is the case with many of the Matterhorn partners as well. However, we are all acutely aware of how rapidly things are changing in video production and distribution. In a market driven by major companies, it is challenging to keep up with technological developments as well as users' expectations - and almost impossible to do it all on your own.

Matterhorn is being developed out of a community of academic institutions sharing the pressure to keep up to date with recent developments - and will therefore alleviate your task of continually further developing a system in place.

Sharing what you've got

The Matterhorn project stems from the Opencast Community and is therefore all about sharing: Knowledge, experience, expertise, technology, content - (almost) everything. Being part of Opencast Matterhorn affords opportunities to share what you've accomplished in an effort to enrich Matterhorn. In an open source community, there is most certainly a return on investment for sharing beyond acknowledgment: The more interest you generate in your technology, the more likely it is for other individuals and organizations to join you in your effort to further develop it.

So if you have expertise in speech-to-text, camera tracking or authentication and authorization technology, why not integrate it into Matterhorn? Its architecture, technology and design, as well as the community behind Matterhorn, provide you with the ideal environment for furthering your ideas.

Unique requirements that don't come with Matterhorn out of the box

Matterhorn will offer the ideal matrix to further develop what is there already. Whether you would like to have a say in the future shape and functionalities of Matterhorn by participating in the Matterhorn project or directly participate in the making of Matterhorn - your help is appreciated! And we would be happy to see you contribute the functionalities that meet your needs as they will almost certainly be helpful to other institutions as well.

Wanting to test Matterhorn 0.5, but need technical assistance

With regard to testing Matterhorn 0.5 as of January 2010, our adoption strategy is to incorporate as many institutions as possible, as we are looking for your feedback. To facilitate your interests in taking a look at Matterhorn, we will establish a number of "base camps" that help you testing. They will run instances of Matterhorn 0.5 for you to access, help you with installing it yourself, enable access to capture agents for testing purposes and support you in case you run into problems. Thus, we would like to establish networks of testing institutions around these base camps, where more advanced institutions will help those making their first steps.