Anystream makes the best presentation recording solution in the market today. The company is based in Sterling Virginia, one of the most wealthy and high-tech communities in the US outside Silicon Valley. Anystream is a dynamic, and fast-growing company which specialises in encoding technology. Their core products are: Agility - a transcoding tool used by broadcasters, and Apreso - principally used by schools to recording classroom lectures.
Apreso is a software application that (with the correct hardware interfaces) allows recording of audio, video and synchronised display graphics. Unlike similar solutions from other vendors, there is no need to prepare materials in advance (eg- uploading of PowerPoint slides), and no post-production work. The recorded presentations are immediately available for viewing minutes after recording.
Anystream recently acquired Australian product Lectopia from the University of Western Australia, and will rebrand Apreso as Echo360 (thus the blog name). According to published reports, the Echo360 brand was chosen "to convey the flexibility of on-demand lecture material for students while signifying the evolution of lecture capture into an important mainstay in higher education". This acquisition will also coincide with Anystream's education division spinning off as its own company, Echo360, Inc.
The product roadmap is still a bit unclear, but I understand from my recent visit to Anystream that the next software release will be version 2.0, and will build on the 1.x technology but with support for editing of recorded presentations and more scalable administration features. One key change is the shift to H.264 encoding for the presentation graphics. This is required to support editing (Flash being impossible to edit), but necesitates H.264 streaming support for delivery. One popular media server that streams H.264 is the free Darwin server from Apple.
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