MEDIAL Explained: Video Management, Live Streaming and LMS Integration
Managing video involves much more than finding somewhere to store it. You need to control access, make recordings easy to reuse, deliver live events and put content where people can actually use it. MEDIAL brings those capabilities together in a complete solution for on-premise or cloud streaming.
Built on the Wowza Streaming Engine, MEDIAL combines a video content management system with live streaming, learning management system integrations and AI tools. The aim is straightforward: give your organisation a connected way to create, manage and deliver video.
Table of Contents
Three Connected Parts of MEDIAL
There are three core parts to the platform, each supporting a different aspect of your video workflow:
MEDIAL Library: Manage, store, archive and display video through a branded portal with permission-controlled access.
MEDIAL Live: Deliver and schedule live streams using customisable playback pages.
MEDIAL Learning: Access video tools within learning management systems such as Moodle, Blackboard, Canvas and Brightspace.
Integrations with Zoom and Microsoft Teams bring meeting recordings into the same environment. Together, these tools connect video storage, live delivery and learning rather than treating them as separate activities.
MEDIAL Library: A Branded Home for Your Video
MEDIAL Library is the content management system at the heart of the platform. Think of it as a corporate YouTube-style portal, with the ability to decide who can access your content.
Administrators use the back end to configure the system, manage permissions, choose transcoding formats, enable closed captioning and set up integrations. They can also customise the library’s appearance to match their organisation.
That flexibility applies across different settings. A car manufacturer can use its own logo and corporate identity, while a university can create a portal that reflects its institutional branding. UCL in London, the largest MEDIAL customer by video volume at the time of this overview, uses the platform for both its video portal and LMS integrations.
Share Content While Controlling Access
Each MEDIAL deployment includes a portal interface and playback pages. Users can obtain sharing links or embed code to place videos on other websites.
Sharing and permissions work together. Video access can be linked to Active Directory, LDAP or single sign-on, allowing your existing directory services to support permissions across the library. This gives you a familiar basis for deciding which groups can access particular content.
Edit Videos and Captions in Your Browser
MEDIAL also supports browser-based editing for both video and closed captions. You can trim footage, remove sections, extract a useful segment or split one recording into several videos without leaving the browser.
Both destructive and non-destructive workflows are available. That means you can choose between changing existing footage and creating new outputs from a source recording. A longer recording can become several focused resources instead of remaining a single, unwieldy asset.
MEDIAL Learning: Video Tools Inside Your LMS
MEDIAL Learning integrates with Moodle, Blackboard, Canvas and Brightspace. Although the surrounding LMS interfaces differ, the core workflow is very similar.
A button in the LMS text editor opens the MEDIAL tools. From there, you can upload a recording, select an existing video, create a new recording or access engagement analytics. The important point is that these functions are available within the learning environment.
This makes reusing content straightforward. Rather than moving through a separate publishing process for each course, you can choose material from your existing library. Analytics also help you understand who accessed a video and how engaged they were with it.
For content creation, MEDIAL Lecture provides browser-based recording. You can capture your screen, your camera or both together. It puts recording alongside uploading and reuse as another option in the same workflow.
Our guide to MEDIAL LMS integration, browser recording and analytics explores how these capabilities fit together.
MEDIAL Live: Control the Whole Event Experience
MEDIAL Live accepts streams from any encoder, whether you use OBS or a dedicated hardware appliance. You point your encoder at MEDIAL, then configure the playback experience around the event.
The playback page is not limited to showing the live feed. You can choose what appears at each stage:
Before the event: Display a pre-roll video or standby message.
During the event: Switch to the live stream.
During a break: Trigger an intermission video with a button.
After the event: Show an event-ended video or an archived recording.
You can switch between states manually or schedule them for specific times. For example, a pre-roll video could begin an hour before the event, with the playback page switching to the live feed at the scheduled start.
Live streams can be protected through security groups linked to Active Directory, LDAP or SSO. Password protection is another option. You therefore have control over both the presentation of the event and access to it.
Once the event is finished, the stream can be archived into MEDIAL Library for later playback. One customer uses live streaming for a rooftop beehive camera in London. It is an unusual example, but the same approach supports more familiar events such as graduation ceremonies and corporate town halls.
Bring Zoom and Teams Recordings into Your Library
Meeting recordings become more useful when they are easy to find and place into learning content. MEDIAL’s Zoom integration ingests recordings from the Zoom cloud and makes them available through its LMS integrations. It also offers a more cost-effective storage alternative to retaining that content in the Zoom cloud.
The Microsoft Teams integration follows a similar pattern, taking recordings from OneDrive or SharePoint into MEDIAL. This helps address the difficulty of sharing Teams recordings outside the Microsoft environment and incorporating them into an LMS.
Imported recordings appear in the content library with Zoom or Teams icons. To embed one in your LMS, you simply choose the relevant item using its Select option.
Use AI for Quizzes and In-Video Search
Create Questions, Then Review and Refine Them
MEDIAL’s AI quiz tools generate questions for your video content. You choose question types, such as multiple choice or true or false, and then review the results.
You remain in control: accept questions, edit them or generate additional ones. The editing interface lets you reorder questions and add annotations or links. Questions appear at appropriate points along the video timeline and are displayed over the video during playback.
Quizzes can be embedded on a website or included in an LMS. When configured as a gradeable LMS activity, results can contribute to the learner’s overall grade and be recorded there. Our overview of MEDIAL’s AI captions, search and quiz features provides more detail.
Find the Exact Moment You Need
MEDIAL also uses AI to analyse video captions and enable in-video search. Searching for a word or phrase takes you directly to the relevant moment, rather than leaving you to search through an entire recording manually.
Searchable words also appear below the video on its playback page, so you can locate relevant material during playback.
A Connected Approach to Organisational Video
MEDIAL brings the video lifecycle together: capture or import recordings, edit and organise them, manage access, deliver live events and reuse content within your LMS. AI quizzes and in-video search add practical ways to assess understanding and find information.
Whether deployed on-premise or in the cloud, the result is one connected platform for managing video and making it useful across your organisation.
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