Y-video is replacing current campus video hosting services
Y-video, the younger, cooler brother of legacy campus hosting services Hummedia and Ayamel, is launched and taking over the family business—starting with the College of Humanities and eventually moving across the entire campus.
The College of Humanities has been using both Hummedia and Ayamel as sites for BYU educators to upload films, YouTube videos, and other media content related to their courses for students to access since 2013. Every humanities course, from Intro to Print Publishing to East Asian Films, uses Hummedia to host course films for student access. Ayamel hosts videos in a similar way but has been especially focused on materials for language learning.
Hummedia and Ayamel require older programing languages and technologies that are no longer supported, which has left the programs vulnerable to security issues. Also, Hummedia and Ayamel are vulnerable to copyright concerns in relation to fair use compliance. Because of these security and legal concerns, the Office of Digital Humanities (ODH), Assistant Research Professor Rob Reynolds (Linguistics and Digital Humanities), and ODH staff member Russell Hansen have been working together with the BYU Copyright Licensing Office to create Y-video—a more seamless, secure, and modernized platform for video materials.
With the updates, Y-video will be more intuitive than Hummedia but just as familiar. The developers hope that it “feels like home” as teachers and students start using it, since they gave it an interface very similar to Hummedia.
Y-video comes with a mobile-friendly website version for students using phones and tablets to access their course materials. (Both of Y-video's older sibling’s sites have desktop versions only, making them more awkward to navigate if students are on the go or have limited technology at their disposal.)
The new platform also utilizes useful language-learning features from Ayamel, such as subtitle navigation. If you are watching a film for your Japanese course and need to interpret or relisten to a part, in Y-video you can open a sidebar transcript of subtitles and click on specific subtitles to return to any phrases you want to catch again. Automatic translation is also built right into the video player for a handful of languages. Further, the Y-video video player has finer playback speed controls, so you can speed up or slow down a video in smaller increments.
Because Hummedia and Ayamel will be phased out at the end of summer, professors should begin migrating their collections as soon as possible. They will need to work with Mr. Hansen in the Office of Digital Humanities to start that process. As they do that, Mr. Hansen and Dr. Reynolds are willing to answer questions and receive feedback on Y-video operations. They are dedicated to making the transition between websites as smooth as possible so when fall classes begin, students can expect to go to Y-video instead of the previous two sites.
The Office of Digital Humanities' blog has more information on completing the migration, and informational meetings will be coming as fall semester gets nearer. But don’t wait for the meetings and the posts; add yvideo.byu.edu to your browser bookmarks right away!
