UCL mediacentral - UCL – University College London

Mediacentral is UCL's enterprise media portal, helping users to share and stream their content to enhance learning, teaching, research, promotional activities, training and improve communications.

Mediacentral News

Adding Blackboard Collaborate videos to Mediacentral

The use of the Blackboad Collaborate service is being brought to closure in May 2022, and users are requested to stop booking any sessions and recordings from 25th April onwards, it is advised that Zoom or Teams are suitable options, depending upon the audience/group.

The video content will be archived, however it is recognised that users may wish to share their files. Where there is a requirement for sharing with externals, or make the content publicly available to anyone, then Mediacentral is suggested as the preferred system.

Information on how to:

Help with how to download your video files from Blackboard can be read here on the Lecturecast Resource Centre

Users should upload their videos using the Upload feature and you can follow the instructions here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/mediacentral/upload-mc

To share the video content users can use the Share link, information is found here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/mediacentral/share-mc

Anyone wanting to add their Blackboard content into UCL Moodle for internal use can see information on the adding content to Lecturecast pages.

For further information regarding the decommission of Blackboard Collaborate, read the story here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/news

Mediacentral to the cloud

Like many other critical IT services, our plan is to move Mediacentral to a 'cloud based service' as soon as feasibly possible, and hope to do this at the end of the spring term 2022.

The use of video at UCL has increased not only due to the pandemic but also because it has become prominent with the rising generation of students who come to UCL. In the 5 years we have been offering our service usage has grown to a point where we have decided to rethink how it is scaled for future years, and the outcome is to move the system to a cloud platform which will allow us to scale as required and give some additional functionality, especially for those consuming video and audio content.

The team who support and deliver Mediacentral are now making preparations for the migration, however in our investigations we have noted that there is much duplication and video content which falls outside of our retention policy.

This note is to inform you that any content you may have uploaded to Mediacentral which has not been viewed or used since March 2020 will be archived and stored off the system, this is in line with our policy for all content. Please note we will keep and not delete your media.

If you have any concerns regarding your media please contact the team via mediacentral@ucl.ac.uk

As per retention policy

Mediacentral content not used in past 24 months will initially be stored offline, we will then sift and move student created content to an online repository for 6 years - assumption being staff should already have their files saved elsewhere. In order to do this we will need to archive some legacy content that is no longer being viewed, we will be contacting users whose media falls outside of our retention policy in the coming weeks and be moving media to safe storage. Any content can be restored if required for reuse.

We also urge all users who are trialing Mediacentral and create test files to delete these once their test has been completed. Please note that test files are not archived and will be deleted in the monthly housekeeping processes.

Zoom and Teams recordings

As part of the move to the cloud we will be adding functionality to allow Zoom and Teams recordings to be injested directly into Mediacentral. This will allow users to share and embed their recordings for users outside of UCL to view, all current levels of access will be granted.

What is Mediacentral

Screenshot of the Mediacentral landing page

Mediacentral is the UCL online video portal, helping users to enable collaboration by sharing video and audio content through a streaming system that works flawlessly behind the scenes and allows you to Create, Manage, Deliver and View all your content within an all-inclusive solution.

The system delivers 'Video on Demand' content directly to your audience whether they are on a mobile or a desktop device and works locally and internationally.

Mediacentral takes the difficulty out of streaming content, whilst giving more control, more engagement, and new ways to communicate – all with less work.

Launch Mediacentral

Mediacentral