Michigan-based screen capture specialist Camtasia has extended the capabilities of its Relay live presentation streaming application - but neglected to include SCORM compliance. John Stokdyk reports.
Having entered the market in education, Camtasia is increasingly focusing on more commercial and training applications, particularly with the new Relay release. The program makes it easy for a presenter to record what is happening on their computer and to save the recording for later playback via the web or in-house content libraries.
Relay 1.1 includes a "portable recorder" that presenters can run from a USB drive and pass on to someone else to process. The USB component is unlimited, so it can be placed on any number of drives and then handled on a machine with the full version of Relay involved, said Camtasia's Rich Boys.
"The presenter wants something that is easy to use. They understand their content, but don't necessarily want to understand the technology that goes with it or have to change their presentation style. We're trying to give them the black box that just works," he said.
With Relay on the server, the user has to hit the Record button on their local PC when they start presenting and click submit when they finish and the material will be emailed to the central server. Relay can then output to whatever media formats the organisation supports - including games consoles, iPods, the iTunes store and Real Media. One notable omission from that list is SCORM, the standard for interoperable content.
"We've tried to leave Relay as open as possible. If a firm already has a learning management system to track who uses content, we can integrate by sending an XML file for the LMS handles within its own wokflow engine," Boys explained.
For the moment, SCORM is not supported within Relay, as few users have indicated they were going to go down that route, Boys said.
"Our issue with SCORM is that no vendor has implemented in same way. We almost end up writing SCORM to export to specific vendors. We'd like to see more consistent development on it. We continue to try and do our updates to fit in with everyone, but some people have said [SCORM] hasn't lived up to its hopes."
Licences for Relay start at $5,000 for a single server education edition that can process one job at a time, up to a limit of 50 hours of flash content per day. The commercial edition starts at $8,000. Prices then increase depending on the number of jobs processed at a time, and the number of servers supported.
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