Mediacentral

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 autumn term 2021.

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 September 2019 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.

As part of our continuing process of developing the Mediacentral service we have recently upgraded to version 7 of the software. The key driver for this is our objective of making the system more resiliant and allowing greater access worldwide

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