Opencast is an open-source video management system focused on higher education institutions and mostly funded and developed by such institutions. They are collaborating within the framework of the Opencast community, an informal association of international academic institutions with a nucleus in Europe and German-speaking countries especially.
Initially - over a decade ago - the main scenario was to use Opencast for automated lecture recordings, providing a soup-to-nuts system with highly efficient (scheduling) recording software for the lecture halls, a video processing pipeline, a sophisticated video player to serve the need of academic content and usage (slide preview, content analysis, zoom feature for blackboard recordings etc.) and integrations into relevant campus infrastructure, especially Learning Management Systems (LMS).
In the meantime, and especially during the COVID pandemic, Opencast was able to improve do-it-yourself features for teachers as end-users of the system: Opencast Studio was created to record videos of the presenter and their screen/presentation without installing additional software, using only the browser, thus allowing recordings "from home". The Opencast Editor is also a browser-based video editor, with an intentionally reduced set of functions so that teachers can do basic video editing themselves as required during the pandemic. Within the LMS integration modules, the reuse of existing videos became more important in the context of Open Educational Resources (OER) so that recordings could be re-used during times of shutdowns. Finally, the Tobira portal was launched, intended as a Youtube-like interface to upload and manage videos and to create categories and course websites for the videos. All these features made Opencast a more flexible video management system to serve requirements beyond the mere capture of lectures in the classroom. Additional modules (annotation/analysis tool, archive feature) completed this process.
Opencast being open-source was the prerequisite institutions were and can adapt their offerings swiftly according to changing needs during (e.g., add live streaming) and after the pandemic (live-cycle management of increased video assets). At the same time, increased usage of Opencast did not result in additional licensing costs like it was and is the case for commercial software solutions.
Opencast cooperates with a number of commercial hardware vendors producing recording devices in order to integrate Opencast with their hardware. While this serves many institutions looking for a uniform hardware infrastructure in their classroom, there is also an open-source alternative where software was developed in the Opencast community for recorders that can be built with standard PC hardware or even Raspberry Pi's. The latter is relevant, especially for institutions with many classrooms and/or limited budgets.
Opencast integrates with most LMS software. There are native plugins for Moodle, Ilias, and Stud.IP. Many other commercial LMSs can integrate with the LTI standard. However, many institutions were able to establish connections to other relevant systems in an academic context: Authentication/authorization with Shibboleth, CAS, and others, plugging into university calendars for scheduling, or connecting to local planning systems for higher automation for teachers (setting up recordings) and students (consuming them). All of these were enabled by the open architecture of Opencast, allowing each and every one to adapt the software to their needs, while collaboratively contributing to a central system third parties can benefit from.
For this, Opencast is designed very modular, initially developed with a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Most of the software/feature elements are OSGI modules with their own REST interfaces that could also be used from any other software. Therefore, today's large functional parts like the Opencast Studio, the Opencast Editor, the Paella Player, and the Tobira portal are standalone components that integrate very well with Opencast but that are also re-useable for other developers and projects; the French Pod system did so by integrating Studio during the pandemic.
As some of these REST interfaces might change from version to version some more stable APIs for the whole Opencast system are available for integrators, to create integrations with other systems, like the Capture Agent API (for recording devices).
As for its usage and "success", Opencast is the most used lecture recording system at German universities according to a 2022 ZKI survey (association of IT Services). Beyond that, Opencast is probably more popular in areas in the world where institutions focus on privacy and data security, as it usually is set up on-premise in the data centers of the institutions unlike most of the commercial competitors that are only offered in the cloud.
The Opencast community organizes two annual conferences to engage and extend the community. One is an English-speaking international summit, and one is a German-speaking event. Based on the experiences during the Corona pandemic, there is also a third digital event planned for November 2023, to find out if these kinds of events are still appreciated by the community.
