Opencast Matterhorn: A community‐driven open source software project for producing, managing, and distributing academic video

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Opencast Community, a global community of individuals, institutions, and commercial stakeholders exchanging knowledge about all matters relevant in the context of academic video and promoting projects in this context. It also gives an overview of the most prominent of these projects, Opencast Matterhorn – a community‐driven open source solution for producing, managing, and distributing academic video.

The paper will demonstrate that Opencast Matterhorn is satisfying institutional needs to manage audiovisual content more efficiently as video is becoming a significant resource in research and education. Furthermore, the paper highlights that Opencast Matterhorn as a product and as a project is open for contributions from the research community and provides an excellent environment for the integration of research results from media analysis, multimedia authoring, search technologies, and other related fields.

Opencast Matterhorn provides a scalable open source solution for universities to manage academic video. Its service‐oriented architecture makes it customizable to institutional needs and open for contributions from users as well as media research.

The paper provides an insight to the idea of Opencast, the Opencast Community, and Opencast Matterhorn – and how they will help academic institutions to better manage and exploit the full richness of educational video.