Video player most used by UK Secondary schools?

[Isaac3142]

I'm having an elearning website created to host several thousand videos for UK GCSE Maths which I have created.

As such, I would very much like to know which video players most schools 'accept' and so would not block access to and therefore my content.

For example, I've heard that VIMEO is blocked by many schools

Thanks in advance!!

[localzuk]

Your best bet is hosting them yourself, with something like Azure Media Services. Yes, it'll cost a bit more than Vimeo, but it will give a MUCH better experience to your customers.

 

I wrote a blog post covering the issue a while ago - https://localz.uk/the-wonderful-world-of-video-hosting/

[bald_pig]

If it's a paid-for service, I'd expect you to host them yourself.

 

You'll find that the majority of schools will be blocking YouTube, Vimeo, or both, so there isn't really a perfect answer outside of self-hosting.

[Edu-IT]

https://www.planetestream.co.uk/

Might be one to look at.

 

Might also considor Microsoft Stream?

 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-stream

Edited April 8, 2021 by Edu-IT

[localzuk]

Might also considor Microsoft Stream?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/microsoft-stream

 

Stream is for internal videos for an org, not external.

[bald_pig]

Stream is for internal videos for an org, not external.

 

Planet estream is too.

[hardtailstar]

Host them yourself.

 

Or if you host them somewhere else make sure you create a whitelist for the schools to add to filtering if they block certain video platforms.

[dhicks]

I'm having an elearning website created to host several thousand videos for UK GCSE Maths which I have created.

 

If this is content you plan to license to schools for a fee, one possibility is to copy the content to a school-owned Google Drive / Office 365 shared drive, then the school could use the content directly in Classroom assignments and presentations.

[Reverend_Dan]

We have strict youtube available but normal youtube blocked to pupils. This also limits adverts and therefore revenue for uploaders though.

Vimeo is blocked completely as there are a no mass filtering options on there at all. There are at a lot of art projects videos on there that aren't child friendly.

[TechMonkey]

Planet estream is too.

 

Nope, you can set videos to public or create a link to bypass authentication.

[bald_pig]

Nope, you can set videos to public or create a link to bypass authentication.

 

Yeah, but that's not the primary use is it?

[TechMonkey]

Yeah, but that's not the primary use is it?

I guess it depends on the school. I would say a large majority of our videos are shared with Parents, for marketing or for prospective parents.

[dhicks]

Your best bet is hosting them yourself, with something like Azure Media Services.

 

Thanks for that link, some useful stuff there - got me thinking about working out hosting costs.

 

Just had a look at Cloudflare's video hosting prices. Assuming "several thousand videos" means 2,000 10-minute videos, that's 20,000 minutes of video to host. That would cost around £75 per month to host on Cloudflare.

 

Assuming one pupil might watch one video per day, and maybe 20 "school" days per month (averaged over the year, some months will be busier, some completly quiet), that's 200 video minutes per pupil per month - call it 250. If an average senior school yeargroup is 150 pupils, the two yeargroups using GCSE content might be 300 pupils - call it 500.

 

500 pupils per school using 250 video minutes per month each is 125,000 video minutes per month per school, about £90 - call it £100.

 

Charge around £1,200 per school per year for access to your video library and you've just about covered your hosting and bandwidth costs.

[localzuk]

Another option is to use something like this - https://www.unified-streaming.com/solutions/video-on-demand

 

It sits atop services such as Azure and provides a user friendly way of dealing with video on demand.

[dhicks]

Assuming "several thousand videos" means 2,000 10-minute videos, that's 20,000 minutes of video to host.

 

As MP4 files, that's maybe around 35GB of storage. If decent-quality streaming video takes 5 Mbps, and a school's worth of pupils (500) all does their classwork / homework at the same time, I reckon you could manage with 2 Gbps of bandwidth server-side, so around a £30 per month hosting cost per school (pricing from OVH's VPS price list, includes VAT). So charge £360 per school per year to cover your hosting costs.

 

500 pupils each watching a 10-minute clip per "school" day is around 1700 hours of video downloaded per month. At 100MB per hour that's maybe 0.2TB total size - should be well under any total size limitations (OVH mention 4TB per month, not sure if that's just for certain regions).

Edited April 9, 2021 by dhicks

[localzuk]

Disadvantage of running your own servers like that @dhicks is that you then need the expertise to maintain them all and scale the system as you go. Increasing costs in a different way.

[Brimstone]

You could also look at TrilbyTV...

 

https://www.trilbytv.co.uk

[Rob_D]

You could also look at TrilbyTV...

https://www.trilbytv.co.uk

 

I'm being dense, how does a signage solution help?

[dhicks]

Increasing costs in a different way.

 

Indeed - Cloudflare are charging around £70 a month (on top of what it would cost for "raw" hosting) to take care of a lot of the details, which is pretty reasonable if you're not at the kind of scale where you can hire a team to develope and monitor a solution for you (more like £10,000 a month).

[jemal]

Vimeo has a mature content filter, similar to the youtube safety mode. When browsing the site (the part that lists videos, not just the homepage), there'll be mention of it in the footer. Our Smoothwall has a premade routine to force vimeo's mature content filter when browsing on our network. I'm not sure how you force it on other setups though.

 

Just to add some points to the debate (albeit probably not too helpful in making firm decision):

 

Youtube - If a school is on GSuite and forces students to login to google when using the PC/Chromebook, you have to disable youtube for under 13's.

 

Vimeo - I hosted videos for an online adult learning training programme in a previous job, and Vimeo was a much better option than youtube from my side of things; on a Vimeo paid account, you can embed your video into your online website, but limit the video to only work when embedded on a certain domain, so the video remains inaccessible to the general public (which was important as the video was for a paid online training course). This was quite a few years ago, I don't know what the market is like now, but back then hosting large HD video files yourself would have been far more expensive and less reliable compared to a paid vimeo account, plus Vimeo is the one that worries about making sure videos are compatible on all user devices and adjusts the quality of the video for the user's bandwidth.

[Brimstone]

I'm being dense, how does a signage solution help?

 

It's not just a signage solution you can watch the videos from any device....have a read maybe.

 

https://www.trilbytv.co.uk/thomass-sharing-remote-learning-videos-securely-with-trilbytv/

Edited April 9, 2021 by Brimstone

[bald_pig]

It's not just a signage solution you can watch the videos from any device....have a read maybe.

 

https://www.trilbytv.co.uk/thomass-sharing-remote-learning-videos-securely-with-trilbytv/

 

Ah yes, the random blog article on the entire website about digital signage, how silly of us!

 

I'm sure I'd love to buy a signage system to sell or offer videos to schools from a website instead of getting something actually designed for the job...

[dhicks]

I don't know what the market is like now, but back then hosting large HD video files yourself would have been far more expensive and less reliable compared to a paid vimeo account, plus Vimeo is the one that worries about making sure videos are compatible on all user devices and adjusts the quality of the video for the user's bandwidth.

 

If my guesses as to video numbers / length / class size / etc are correct-ish, hosting the kind of content the original poster is talking about on Cloudflare's system might cost around £100 per month per school, I'm guessing other similar products (and a bunch of them come up as paid ads when you type "cloudflare video hosting" into Google) are a similar price. They seem to offer a good set of capabilities, including a customisable video player and auto-encoding of video assets from any format to various different qualities. There would, of course, be more integration work to do between whatever front end / authentication mechanism you're using and the actual video player part of things.