KnowledgeVision Systems, a leader in smart media creation and hosting technology, has announced the immediate availability of a major update to Knovio, its cloud-based online video platform. Knovio 3.0 dramatically expands the capabilities of an online media platform that’s already used by more than 235,000 registered users in more than 2,000 companies and campuses on six continents.

Knovio supports a comprehensive set of online video formats, from simple drag-and-drop video hosting and streaming to rich, interactive video-enhanced online presentations with embedded assessments. All Knovio-based videos are played through responsive, HTML5-based smart players, viewable in any web browser or mobile device without special plug-ins or apps. Knovio videos can be embedded in websites, shared through social media, and posted into third-party systems like CRM’s, marketing automation, sales enablement platforms, and learning management systems.

New Features in Knovio 3.0

The Knovio 3.0 update includes:

• New smart media players for adaptive-bitrate video streaming and presentation “flip decks”;
• New workflows for creating trackable online video content from video and presentation files;
• New collaboration tools for inviting others into the video creation process;
• New showcase building tools for creating, sharing, and tracking instant video collections and microsites;
• New comprehensive dashboards that reveal insights from a patented system for tracking, engagement scoring, and connections to third-party systems; and
• An entirely new user experience that features smart file type detection for uploaded media, suggesting all the next steps a user might take with an uploaded file.

In an interview via email, KnowledgeVision CEO Michael Kolowich said, “It’s time for business video platforms to raise their game. That means embedding video creation tools, collaboration workflows, deep viewer-by-viewer engagement metrics, interactive smart players, instant video microsites, and quizzing right into their platforms. Knovio 3.0 raises the bar by offering all these features in an easy drag-and-drop interface.”

Knovio offers a range of editions to meet the needs of every type of video user:

• Knovio Enterprise Edition, for company-wide video platform deployments;
• Knovio Corporate Edition, for workgroups, departments, and teams;
• Knovio Suite, which gives the full range of Knovio’s tools to power communicators;
• Knovio Gold, for educators and trainers who want to build learning video assets;
• Knovio Pro, an entry-level product for individual business professionals;
• Knovio Student Edition, which places many pro features in the hands of students;
• Knovio Lite, a limited free product for creating simple video and online presentations.

Quick evaluation of Knovio 3.0

I took Knovio 3.0 for a quick spin around the block and here’s what I found: The principal building block of the Knovio system is its Smart Player. The Knovio Smart Player combines one or more content streams, navigation, and widgets such as dynamic footnotes, searchable follow-along transcripts, quizzes, and question forms into a complete, measurable interactive multimedia experience.

Knovio is designed to host three principal types of cloud-based media content:

• On-demand and live video streams;
• Interactive video presentations; and
• Self-paced presentation “flip decks.”

As a Knovio user, you are able to:

• Upload or create video content using Knovio’s integrated platform tools;
• Format the video content using one of more than two dozen customizable player design templates;
• Enhance it by adding chapters, footnotes and attachments, programmable zooms, and attachments;
• Augment it with a multi-part quiz or assessment, which would be very handy to have in many of the online courses that I teach;
• Organize it along with other content into an online showcase;
• Register who’s viewing the content using a guest book, and secure it with a password and other access controls;
• Invite collaborators to contribute content; and
• Measure the performance of both your content and of individual viewers in absorbing your message, using KnowledgeVision’s patented integrated tracking, analytics, and engagement scoring system.

The Knovio Video Showcase

The second principal building block of the Knovio platform is the Video Showcase. A showcase is an organized collection of video content that can be launched in minutes and revised with a few clicks of a mouse.

These branded showcases have their own custom web address, and can be as public or private as you want. Corporate and enterprise-level showcases can incorporate pull-down menus and filters that turn a showcase into a full-fledged microsite for rich, highly accessible collections of video and rich media content. Among the brands using Knovio are ADP, Aetna, Bazaarvoice, McDonalds, Merck, and the NBA.

Upload and share a presentation Flip Deck

A “Flip Deck” is a way to take a presentation — sourced from either PowerPoint or PDF – and turn it into a Knovio that can be shared and viewed in exactly the same way that other Knovio video or online presentations can be viewed or shared. When sourced from PowerPoint, Knovio flip decks preserve and play slide animations. I can’t tell you how many of the online courses that I teach at either Rutgers Business School Executive Education or Simplilearn are built around PowerPoint presentations, but I’ve been creating them since 2007 – so this is a key feature for me.

Organize your Knovios into a branded video showcase

A Knovio Showcase is a way to gather together multiple Knovio videos, interactive presentations, and flip decks into a branded collection, arranged in an attractive branded grid, with its own address on the web. They can be assembled in minutes, and can be updated and rearranged with a few mouse clicks. I’ve been uploading videos to YouTube since 2006, and it doesn’t offer anything like this – and neither does Facebook Video.

Add a guestbook to a Knovio

Knovio offers a unique and patented tracking system that measures how viewers are interacting with your Knovio video content. While tracking is enabled automatically, viewers are tracked anonymously unless: a.) you add a guestbook to the presentation or showcase; b.) you use Knovio to email a presentation to a particular viewer; or c.) you add viewer-specific tracking information to a Knovio link you send out. Neither YouTube nor Facebook Video offers anything like this.

Add a quiz to a Knovio

Knovio allows the creation and insertion of multi-part quizzes into any Knovio. Questions can be graded or ungraded multiple-choice, or open response. You can specify how the quiz should be scored, what the passing grade is, and even issue a personalized PDF completion certificate when a viewer passes the assessment. I could have used this feature scores of times over the past 10 years.

Invite a collaborator to create a Knovio

With Knovio, you can invite someone else to create or narrate an interactive presentation, even if that person doesn’t have a Knovio account. The resulting content will return back to you for review, and, if you accept it, will reside in your Knovio Library. Now, I’ve flown solo for virtually all of the online courses that I’ve taught over the past decade, although I have often collaborated with colleagues during workshops held on site. So, I could use this feature with a couple of Buckeyes from The Ohio State University who I know (I’m a Wolverine from the University of Michigan).

Analyze your content’s performance

Driven by its patented engagement measurement system, Knovio offers the deepest analytics available from any online video content platform. Now, if you’re just trying Knovio out for the first time, then you won’t yet have the kinds of data and insights that you will once thousands of people have viewed your Knovios. But I encourage you to browse some of the reports that they’ve made available to check out. Every time a Knovio is viewed, their servers record information about how long it was viewed, how the viewer interacted with it, quiz answers and results, and detailed guestbook information.

I’ve just scratched the surface of Knovio’s comprehensive video platform and multimedia functionality. Kick its tires for yourself. Here’s something that you can try: Use the “Sync” feature to build an interactive multimedia experience by syncing pre-recorded video of someone giving a presentation (such as a keynote speech, employee meeting, or analyst briefing) with the slides for that presentation. This requires a small piece of downloadable software called KVStudio, which is included with all Knovio Suite, Corporate, and Enterprise Edition accounts. As a former speechwriter for the CEOs of Wang Laboratories, Data General, and Lotus Development Corporation in the 1980s as well as Ziff-Davis in the 1990s, I would have loved to have had this capability back then. But, it’s available today – so KnowledgeVision’s Knovio 3.0 is not your father’s online video platform.