New ETH video portal

IT Services are running a video portal for ETH for almost twenty years now:

Initially, it was a podcast portal that delivered content in the then popular RSS format and videos that were very small by today’s standards. The subsequent multimedia portal ran on the REPLAY video management system developed at ETH and increased the degree of automation as well as the video quality and the range of functions. In 2015, we then switched to the video portal and AEM: With the support of our colleagues at ITS APPS (Roman Bruggisser, Christian Schär), the content management system was operated by Opencast, an open source solution for video management. This had previously been developed in a multi-year collaboration with international universities. Once again, numerous functions (video segmentation, slide recognition with OCR, search) were added.

ETH on iTunesU(niversity), ca. 2007

New impetus

The project for a new video portal was launched in 2020 in consultation with ITS APPS in order to decouple the video portal, its further development, and support from AEM and APPS. However, the project had to be put on hold during the coronavirus pandemic due to other priorities. With the teaching retreat in 2022, the portal also received new impetus from teaching, which had to be taken into account as well. In collaboration with the University of Bern and, since 2024, LMU Munich, the IT Services played a leading role in the open source project Tobira, a React-based video portal specifically for universities, which in turn is based on Opencast. The implementation was carried out by elan e. V. in Germany, which provides corresponding services for universities and already supports ETH in the operation and further development of Opencast.

Video portal specifically for universities

The portal essentially has two sides: on the one hand, it is used by Multimedia Production to publish its productions, as before. These are primarily and in large numbers lecture recordings, which are automatically created in the lecture hall. For these, we now offer course-based authentication based on the PCA service, thanks to Michael Dimmler & Co.

In addition, there are numerous event recordings (including introductory and farewell lectures) as well as institutional videos, which are also permanently stored in the backend of the video portal.

On the other hand, there are now also numerous options for individual use: Employees can

• create videos themselves using webcam, audio and screen recordings (Studio),
• upload videos and edit them: in addition to cutting, metadata can also be adjusted, preview images selected and subtitles edited.
• The latter are automatically generated for each video using Azure to meet accessibility requirements. With a few restrictions, the video portal itself also meets these requirements.
• Employees can also create their own pages in the portal where videos and text can be combined; however, these pages are not visible in the video portal navigation.
• All videos can also be embedded in AEM using their URL.

Phases of the video lifecycle

The migration took place on September 4^th with minimal disruption. At the same time, a video policy was established for the first time, which defines the handling of videos over time, from publication to depublication and storage to archiving and deletion; this was also done with the aim of a more efficient use of the infrastructure. As a result, the visible inventory in the video portal was reduced from approximately 85,000 videos to around 40,000, which improves clarity. Initially, only lecture recordings older than three years were depublished; the other requirements of the video policy will be implemented from 2026 onwards. To ensure a smooth transition, however, all videos from the old portal will be available in an archive version until the end of 2025.

Documentation and webinar

The functions of the video portal are documented in the knowledge portal. On 30 October, there will also be a webinar on the topic in L3H (German only).

Plans for the future

Several enhancements are already planned for 2026, including playlists to enable the compilation of videos, and Azure will ideally be replaced by Whisper. Not to mention, of course, any requirements of the digital campus: we already use OIS to programme lectures and, thanks to the MobMat interface, can adapt to any changes made in the VVZ; conversely, information about lecture recordings flows back and can be made visible by lecturers in the VVZ. In addition, we provide the library with information about all published videos and make this available in Swisscovery.

Contact

Olaf A. Schulte, Group Head Multimedia Production (ITS INFRA), IT Services

erstellt am 06.10.2025 von Sabine Hoffmann
in News Schlagwörter: ETH video portal,IT Services,Multimedia Production