The lecture capture market is estimated at $50M/year in higher education and is likely to triple over the next 6 years. That's a lot of money to be spent, and a lot of lectures captured. Now, as it so often does, the higher education IT community has created an open-source alternative. But can universities save money with it?

“If you look at research on the total cost of ownership for servers running applications, about 80 percent of total cost of ownership is from ongoing management and maintenance,” says Michael Berger, director of marketing at Tegrity, which offers a hosted lecture capture service that starts at $10,000 for 250 hours. “You can make it do just about anything you want,” says Burns, of Panopto. “But you have to put a lot of quarters in the slot.” This is especially true, the providers say, if you want to deploy it in a lot of classrooms.

Such is the refrain of the commercial establishment. But Hochman, the Matterhorn project manager, says that while it does cost money to build and maintain the open-source system, the price is not unmanageable, even at scale. He also says that although the commercial companies do add a lot of value by being able to troubleshoot errors quickly, the members of the OpenCast community are hardly slouches, and can advise on a problem in a pinch. And it is only a matter of time, he says, before some entrepreneurs make a business out of providing stable support to Matterhorn users, like Moodlerooms has for Moodle users.

Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Here's your SCUP Link to the initial source for 'Screened' Out: Display Screens as Functional or Aesthetic Design Elements.

Sometime back in the 1990s, I made a case for screens—video monitors, computer displays—as the architectural ornament of our time. As Notre Dame has gargoyles, we have our screen-size talking heads. For this, I apologize. I’ve now decided that it’s time for the age of the ubiquitous screen to be over. 

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My evidence for this is thin; screens big and small are still proliferating. But I’ve had a series of conversations with interior designers about what the future might look like, and most of them downplayed technology’s role in their aesthetic. Words like authentic and homelike have replaced wired or smart. And I take it as a good sign that in New York, the gathering places for a new generation of digital entrepreneurs are self-consciously creaky: the new Breslin at the Ace Hotel, the old NoHo hangout Tom & Jerry’s, “a place so low tech you can’t even run up a credit card tab,” as Susan Dominus writes in the New York Times. 

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Oddly, it was a recent visit to MIT that suggested that this might be more than wishful thinking on my part, that perhaps the technological project we embarked on in 1990s, the relocation of all our transactions and interactions to screens, is pretty much over.