Happy Friday! 
This week I want to shine a light on a Mediasite feature that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: Guided Playback.
Imagine this: you’re running a training session or onboarding day. You’ve got people on laptops, tablets, phones, maybe even a VR headset or two in the room. You want everyone watching the same video, at the same moment, in sync. Normally that’s a bit of a logistical headache.
With Guided Playback, you add all of those devices into a control panel inside Mediasite: laptops, mobiles, tablets, VR headsets, you name it. You load up a single video to the controller, hit play, and every device starts playing simultaneously.
The feature came to Mediasite off the back of a really interesting use case from one of our Dutch customers. They wanted to provide in ‘In the field’ experience for potential future employees to get a sense of what working for that organisation would look like.
They would get a handful of users lined up at a conference, have them all put on the VR headsets and then the organiser would press play on the guided playback controller. Like magic, everyone was transported to this amazing in-synchronous 360° space at the same time. After the video finishes, everyone can be quizzed at the same time, creating a great user-experience.
Use case idea:
Use case idea: This is brilliant for in-person onboarding days, classroom settings, trade show demos, or anywhere you need a room full of people to watch the same content without everyone fumbling with their own device trying to find the right link.
It’s one of those features that sounds simple but is genuinely impressive when you see it in action, especially when you’ve got a mix of device types all starting in perfect sync.
You can try it on your own site by going to the following URL extension:
Mediasite/guidedplayback
(For example: https://demo.mediasite.com/mediasite/guidedplayback)
Once there, you have 2 portals: Admin or Client.
When setting up a device like a VR Headset, browse to the ‘Client’ portal. You’ll see the following:
Make a note of that code or get your user to shout it out for the following step.
Now access the ‘Admin’ portal and you should see something like this (without any devices added yet:
Simply click on the ‘Add New’ button and enter your devices code, give that device a name and press register:
You will see when that device has successfully connected as it will say ‘Connected’:
Then proceed by click on the ‘Continue to Playback’ button.
You’ll then see all of your devices on the left and the ability to select a video for playback in the middle. Simply paste in your Mediasite Presentation URL. This can be a standard flat video or a 360° video.
Now, once you have your video in place, simply press ‘Play to all devices’ to start playback in real-time to all of your devices.
Have you used Guided Playback before? Do you have any workflows that you think this might help address? Let us know below. Always curious to hear the creative use cases! 