With the advent of online video, audio, and podcasts, rich media has rapidly become an integral component of teaching and learning. The ShareStream Rich Media Platform, which was developed in collaboration with Georgetown University at its Sun Center of Excellence, provides a turnkey system for creating, managing, and securely delivering rich media assets, designed specifically to fulfill rising demand from faculty, students, and administrators for integrating rich media into online course delivery

ShareStream’s Rich Media Building Block for the Blackboard Learn Platform allows educational institutions to extend the Blackboard Learn Platform with a state-of-the-art rich media solution for the full lifecycle of media that is available seamlessly within the familiar context of the Blackboard Learn environment. Through implementation of ShareStream’s Blackboard Building Block, Blackboard Learn administrative and faculty users are provided the capability to:

Digitize, Transcode, and Batch Migrate large multimedia collections in an automated fashion

Upload media to "watch folders" that automatically transcode files to the appropriate end formats

Edit media through ShareStream’s online video-editing tool, which provides time-based editing, clip trimming, overlays, and other capabilities

Store and manage media collections in an enterprise-wide asset-management system optimized for large rich media files

Preserve valuable content through ShareStream’s encoding methodology, which creates eMaster files to ensure that assets can be converted to future standard formats

Search and efficiently browse for and identify relevant learning objects via metadata-driven advanced search

Control access to copyrighted content and manage digital media licenses via higher-education-specific digital rights management, access control, security, and identity management

Stage the process of publishing with workflow and business process management functionality with compliance approvals and edits across multiple groups

Deliver Media through On-demand Streaming, Live Streaming, and Streaming to Mobile Devices to users with wide-ranging levels of Internet connectivity

Deep Embed Thumbnails to multiple locations, including websites, applications, and even emails, in a secure, password-protected manner or in an open environment, through ShareStream’s deep-embedding functionality

Create educational videos synchronized with slides and tablet activity with ShareStream’s CourseProducer module

Author Web 2.0 learning objects comprised of video, audio, podcasts, images, and segments from e-books in a template-based drag-and-drop fashion that staff and faculty with minimal digital literacy can create

Audit all user and content accesses via a reporting tool that allows institutions to manage digital-media licenses