The global COVID-19 pandemic has forced colleges and universities around the world to close their campuses and move all instruction online in a matter of weeks. At Echo360, we’ve seen a significant increase in video creation and viewing across our global higher education client base during this period. We are sharing some of these early trends to provide some context for what you are experiencing at your campus, both now and in the coming weeks and months.

As the leading video platform provider to major universities in Australia, we saw our first uptick in usage in early February as clients there began to scale online instruction to reach quarantined students in China. Knowing that this would probably lead to supply constraints, we also used this early warning to accelerate parts procurement and production plans for Echo360 capture appliances to avoid inventory shortages later in the year.

Echo360 usage continued to increase dramatically in February and March as the pandemic forced campus closures across all of our major global markets, including North America, Europe, Middle East, and Southeast Asia. To support our clients, we quickly instituted special programs to enable expanded usage and help instructors move their courses online using the Echo360 platform. We also adjusted our product development roadmap to accelerate delivery of selected features that can help users better manage their expanded online offerings.

Here are some of the most notable Echo360 usage trends that we are currently seeing in our college and university clients:

Video Creation Grows Rapidly as Instruction Moves Online

Not surprisingly, the overall volume of newly created Echo360 video has grown dramatically since the start of the year. For example, the amount of video created in the last week of March was nearly 3X the amount generated in the last week of January. To put this in context, during the month of March, Echo360 users created more than forty (40) years of cumulative video content – much of it in the final two (2) weeks of the month.

Seamless Transition From Classroom to Personal Recording

Traditionally, many institutions use Echo360 to automatically schedule, record, and publish lectures conducted in classrooms and lecture halls across campus. With campuses closed, however, instructors must teach their courses from their home offices or other locations using their personal laptops. Fortunately, the user-friendly Echo360 Universal Capture software has enabled instructors to make the transition from classroom to personal recording with minimal effort and disruption. From the beginning of February through the end of March the amount of personal video captures on Windows and Mac laptops increased by a factor of nearly 12X, which explains how total video creation has increased even after campuses were closed.

More Video for More Users

As Echo360 is made available to more instructors and students, we have seen a nearly 4X increase in unique daily active users across all regions. And along with the increase in active users, on-demand viewing has increased by 4.4X, meaning more users are viewing more content than ever before.

Increased Support from Echo360 During the COVID-19 Crisis

In addition to the direct support that every Echo360 client receives from their dedicated customer success manager and technical support representative, we have created extensive new resources designed to help our clients manage their rapid shift to online instruction.  We’ve launched a new series of webinars focused on how to get your classes online quickly and response has been overwhelmingly positive. The first session, our most popular training event ever, was attended or reviewed by several hundred instructors. We have also compiled a comprehensive set of COVID-19 documentation and instructional videos available to all clients on our website (www.echo360.com) and our support portal (support.echo360.com).

The Echo360 Platform has Successfully Met the Scalability Challenge

Six years ago, we committed to completely rebuild the Echo360 platform using a modern Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) architecture designed to scale automatically based on rapid changes in demand. This rebuild was an important investment meant to “futureproof” our solution, and we’ve been pleased with the performance in the face of an unprecedented crisis.

While we’ve recently seen accounts of other video products struggling with increased usage, we’re pleased to report that the Echo360 platform has flawlessly handled the dramatically increased workload.

Looking ahead, we expect platform usage to continue to grow through the spring and summer terms. We have just released live streaming for Universal Capture Personal, making it easier for instructors to live-stream from anywhere, so we anticipate seeing a large increase in video streaming this month. We are confident that the Echo360 platform will continue to scale to meet our clients’ needs and we will check in next month with another update.