Headline features

• New mobile and embedded video player — A rich video consumption experience on mobile devices and embedded videos, enabling users to access the table of contents, search within videos as well as rate them on their mobile devices and embedded videos in a webpage. They can also take notes and post discussions from within the embed player on the web and mobile. The new experience is available to everyone by default.
• Departmental Administration — Customers will be able to give users or user groups administrative access to specific departments, allowing them to manage content and access to content within a department. They will also be able to manage department branding. This capability will allow customers to manage departments more effectively by delegating responsibility to users who are responsible for each department’s video content.
• Improved session chooser and playlist creation workflows — Users will be able to search in the embedded video/playlist chooser when embedding videos in external systems, building featured videos for the homepage, or building playlists as well as adding playlists to departmental homepages. In the embedding workflow, users will be able to search for videos that they have creator access to and public videos.
• Content Retention — Admins will be able to set retention policies for their sites to make it easier to manage content on their site. Admins will be able to user criteria like creation or modification date, last viewed date, or availability to automatically identify content that is old or seldom used. Automatic rules like delete or hide can then be applied on the content identified by the set criteria. For any retention policy on a site, Admins will be able to see an audit of all content affected by a particular policy, and be able to manually retain content if needed. There is also a history report that shows all content affected by content retention policies in the past. Lastly, admins can also specify who should get Content Retention related email notification.
• Analytics improvements — The improved visualizations introduced in Panopto 6 are now also available to creators. This means content creators can see analytics for all of their videos across the site or for a particular folder (incl. sub-folders) or video. Additionally, there are a couple of new data insights available:
  • Completion percentage: Creators can see the completion percentage for each user who has viewed their video. Admins can see this for all users and videos.
  • Creators can see per-user stats, answering “which of my videos has this user watched?”.

Administrators will also be able to schedule recurring nightly reports as well as get reports emailed to them as daily, weekly or monthly digests. This means administrators no longer have to remember to manually request reports for data they need regularly.

• Rest API — New REST APIs will allow developers to automate sessions & folders management, and schedule and manage recordings on remote recorders. These new REST APIs use the familiar OAuth2 standard for authentication, allowing developers to authenticate their API clients easily.
• API reference is available at https://<panopto server>/Panopto/Api/Docs/index.html, including staging sites.

Behavior changes and new features

Settings updates

The following settings have changed in this release:

• Embedded Viewer in Android and iOS mobile applications: Both the Android and iOS app will use the new embedded viewer for playback, by default. 
• Make Groups Private By Default: Added a new site setting which controls the ability for authenticated users to find and use ‘User Groups’. By default, user groups are visible to authenticated users and it can be changed in the User Group settings modal.
• Recorder client message: Admins can now show a message to their users when logging into the recorder clients. The following settings will enable this capability:
  • RecordingClientsAlertMessage
  • RecordingClientsAlertMessageURL
  • RecordingClientsAlertMessageURLTitle
• Network access rule content blocked message: Admins can now provide a custom message displayed to users when their content is blocked by a network access rule.
• Network access rule content blocked video (iOS): Admins can now provide a custom video (at the supplied url) to show users on iOS when their content is blocked by a network access rule.
• Copied sessions retain viewer permissions: When sessions are copied, the new copies inherit only their folder’s permissions, rather than also retaining session-specific permissions from the source session.

The following settings have been removed in this release:

• Folder & Session Availability Windows: Availability windows can no longer be disabled.

The following settings have been added in this release:

• Settings to enable and configure Hive WanOp:
  • Enable Hive webcast streaming
  • Hive Customer ID
  • Enable Hive for VOD

VCMS & User experience

• Fill in the Blanks — Added a new question type in quizzes, allowing users to add fill in the blanks or short answer questions.
• Download notes — Users can download their notes or notes from any public channel for a particular video.
• Download discussion transcript — Admins and video creators will be able to download a transcript of the discussion. Moderators will have access to live stats via a link from the viewer.
• Added a link to departmental settings from the departmental folder setting modal. This link is only visible to creators and admins of the folder.
• Added ability to allow select multiple playlists when adding playlists to department homepage.
• Updated session thumbnails in web UI to show how much of a video the user has already watched. 
• Added a “Publish” button in the video list. This option shows up for any videos that are currently outside of the availability window, and clicking the button makes the video available in the folder immediately to users who already have permissions to the video.
• The login user experience has been updated to match the visual elements of the rest of the Panopto web experience.
• Removed tablet encodings as the new embed player is used for an enhanced tablet playback experience instead.
• Users can specify the set of admins who should get Content Retention related email notification in Content Retention “Settings”. If it is left empty, it will default to all admins on the site.
• Updated “Show scheduled recordings” functionality to be on visible to users who are able to schedule recordings.
• Updated icons in the Create menu on Panopto site to match material UI guidelines.
• Updated certain icons in the list sessions to match material UI guidelines.

Editor

• Improved content creation workflows — In the editor, the cut and pointer tools have been merged, giving users a simpler experience where they can precisely apply and test cuts to videos or streams.
• Added ability to seek and get a preview of timeline positions within a cut boundary even with "Preview cuts during playback" is enabled.
• Added ability to see cut handles for head and tail of each individual streams in addition to session head and tail.
• In the editor, there is a terminology change, where "Apply" replaces the verb "Publish". This is meant to reduce user confusion as "publish" gave the impression that the visibility or permissions on the video might change.
• "Apply" makes it clear that the users are applying their edits and changes to the video.
• Updated quiz UI to not need clearing of placeholder text.

Integrations

• The Blackboard Ultra integration is now generally available.
• The D2L integration supports reporting quiz results into the LMS Gradebook.
• Username of a new user may not include colon. Existing user accounts whose user name includes colon may be renamed in the future after further notice.
• Panopto will show an error message when LTI embedded session list or embedded video cannot be displayed due to an error, rather than silently sending the user to the home page.
• First/last name and email address of external users (users who are authenticated by external ID provider) will become not editable on Panopto web interface in order to avoid divergence from the information provided by ID provider.
• When a user group associated to a folder for LMS course is removed from its sharing setting, it is not automatically re-associated with the folder. This behavior can be used to let Panopto provision course folder accesses automatically in general while the administrator wants to make some exceptions manually.
• Captioning — A new captioning provider, AI Media, will be added to provide improved captioning support for customers outside the US.
• Basic LTI Identity Providers will now have the setting “Suppress access permission sync on LTI link” set to “True” to improve performance. Contact Panopto support team if you need to keep this option "False".
• When custom role mappings are defined in ID provider setting (Canvas or D2L) and any standard role is not described in that mappings, that role will be mapped to either creator or viewer according to the default mapping. It was enforced to map viewer before 7.0.
• Improved quiz result gradebook integration feature of Canvas and Blackboard integrations to report the result more reliably.
• Changed the behavior when trying to view an embedded sessions and the user is not logged into Panopto. If the ID provider has the "Bounce page blocks iframes" setting turned on, the Panopto login screen will now always appear, and clicking the "Sign in" button will automatically open a new login window for the ID provider.

Analytics

• Added a per-user summary for quiz results for videos with multiple quizzes. 
• Added ability to cancel creation of pending usage reports. The report can be canceled from the Reports UI under System menu.
• Updated license page to more accurately reflect public usage.
• Added ability to view total stored hours on the License Page under System menu for admins.
• Added a new report to show completion percentage by users for all sessions in a folder.
• Added completion percentage column to relevant downloadable reports.

Search

• Smart search will be expanded to additional languages: Swedish, Danish, Hungarian, Norwegian.
• Improved screen text capture accuracy in various situations.

Bug fixes and minor changes

VCMS

• Fixed an issue where creating a new user group was failing in some situations.
• Fixed an issue where the preview image for remote recorders was not getting updated correctly.
• Fixed an issue where incorrect permissions were applied to a copied session.
• Fixed an issue where users with insufficient privileges were able to create sub-folders under approval enabled folder.
• Fixed an issue with deleting sessions from Panopto for Windows, where the session would occasionally have all of its contents deleted, but be left on the server.
• Fixed an issue where podcast was incorrectly available for download when Podcasts were disabled.
• Fixed an issue where setting 'CopyrightWarningTextForUploads' didn't have a user friendly name and description.
• Fixed an issue where some UI text was not localized correctly in certain languages.
• Fixed an issue where dropbox users incorrectly see “Scheduled Recordings” in the Create menu.
• Fixed an issue where Webcast email shows broken thumbnail image.
• Fixed an issue where UI text was not displayed correctly in System menu when resizing.
• Fixed an issue where all six custom links were not available to admins for help menu.
• Fixed an issue in the viewer where hitting 'Esc' key did not exist full screen mode on

Video Playback

• Fixed an issue where clicking on player controls incorrectly exits full-screen mode.
• Fixed an issue where spliced sessions played incorrectly in some situations. 
• Fixed an issue where notes taken at the same point in the video were not sorted correctly.
• Fixed an issue where a video didn't play correctly when embedded in Moodle.
• Fixed an issue where the video started in an incorrect position in the embedded player.

Editor

• Fixed an issue in the editor where users were not able to make a session cut when hovering over a presentation view.
• Fixed an issue where right clicks performed unintended actions in the editor timeline.
• Fixed an issue where the audio histogram and actual audio were out of sync in the editor.

Core Services

• Enhanced the performance of the Everything page in the Web UI.

Integrations

• Fixed an issue where video embedding tool did not work in Canvas group discussion under certain conditions.
• Fixed an issue where batch create users feature mistakenly reported that the user already existed if the same user name exists in another ID provider.
• Fixed an issue where LTI request to create personal folder made unintended context/course folder.
• Fixed an issue where a student can incorrectly have access to the folder where Blackboard video assignment is submitted.
• Fixed an issue where copy course structure from Desire2Learn did not work correctly under certain conditions.
• Fixed an issue where "Sign Out" link in the video player did not invoke sign-out of ID provider even if the site is configured to do so.
• Fixed an issue where a user accessed Panopto LTI tool from Canvas on which the user has not signed in caused Panopto to create a dummy user account and grant access to course folder.
• Fixed an issue in the current Zoom integration where uploads would fail for certain users.

Public APIs

• Fixed an issue where WSDL file provided for SOAP API has http:// protocol as endpoint URL even though the actual access point is HTTPS.
• Fixed an issue where the recurring schedule recordings made by SOAP API may have one excessive recording beyond end date under certain conditions.
• SAML2.0 service provider metadata XML is now provided by "SP metadata XML" button in ID provider setting UI.
• Upload API will support access token by OAuth2.

Captioning

• Fixed an issue where transcription requests to 3Play timed out in rare occasions.
• Updated the name of transcription providers appearing in Panopto UI for more clarification. None of service condition have changed.
• Added a warning message if caption data is uploaded to a video session where primary video stream does not exist.
• Fixed an issue where error state of transcription request did not disappear even when the retry succeeded and transcription data became available.
• Fixed an issue where 3Play would not process large files.

Analytics

• Made performance improvements to analytics dashboards.
• Made performance improvements to UsageReporting APIs.