Midsummer MediaLab Update

June 21, marks the summer solstice for us here in Amsterdam, a day often celebrated with festivals and rituals. We even had a summer party ourselves with the rest of our colleagues at PQR. On a day like this, it’s a good time to look back and give you all a quick recap of what’s been happening here at MediaLab HQ.

As always, the development team has been working hard the last few months and we have a lot of things going on. Let’s have a look!

MediaLab

We began the journey last year. Our website was outdated, the team was changing with new people joining us and we had new stories to tell you. With help from a professional agency, we had multiple team sessions to figure out who we are, what we offer and how that helps our customers. With all this information, we started the journey of making sure our website provides you with all relevant information about our product, features and solutions. The last couple of weeks have been hectic, but now we are proud to present this team effort to you. Our new website at www.MediaLab.co is live!

If you are a regular user, you will no doubt have noticed our new search box. Previously, the quick search would only search the contents of the current page and searching for other media would take you to the Search workspace. The new quick search will now show you the 5 most relevant media files and folders according to your search query for quick navigation. If you need more results, or want to fine tune the keywords with meta-data, the search workspace is still there by clicking on “View all results”.

Media Archiving

In collaboration with EMG, we have developed a professional archiving integration for your media files. We will definitely spend a dedicated blog post on this later on, but we just wanted to mention it here because it has been in the works for months. Cloud storage isn’t the cheapest place to store your high-resolution media files for the long term. We now provide an integration with MediaLab so you can archive the source files on LTO tape storage with our partner, while keeping the online playback version available in MediaLab. You will be able to search your archive, even share and watch the online previews and directly retrieve the source material from the archive when necessary.

Unsplash backgrounds

We have always supported custom backgrounds for our login pages so you can give it some awesome styling to match your company’s brand identity. However, having a single background can be so…. boring 😉 By popular demand, we have added integration with Unsplash, a well-known source for freely available high quality images, to provide you with a random background every time you come back to MediaLab. We liked it so much we even made it the new default setting for new clients! If you haven’t seen it yet, head over to this feature page to learn how to enable it for your channel.

Coming up: panorama support

Almost ready to go and looking awesome: full support for panoramic images! It started with a request from a real-estate vendor to share panoramic images of the interior and we are happy to announce that we will release support for panoramic images later this summer. It will fully integrate with the rest of our features, so even embedding our panorama player on your website will be no problem at all.

Coming up: video markers

Our clients have been using the comments a lot to share feedback, so we are always looking at ways to make this easier for you. We are beta-testing our video markers inside the video player to show you where the feedback belongs while watching the video. When sharing a file, we now also provide a checkbox “View comments” to share all existing comments with a file. This will allow the receiver to easily check all feedback in the player.

Mobile app updates, new share, mail integration and more

Honestly, we can keep on going because we’ll keep doing our best to make sure MediaLab is the best available tool to easily share your media. With holidays coming up, July and August are going to be a little more quiet at the office, but of course there will be enough of us here to help you out with ongoing support or requests. Let us know if there are any issues you have or features you like. We always like to hear from you. During business hours you can now also get in touch with us over WhatsApp at +31611862112.

With that being said, enjoy the warm days ahead of us, stay hydrated and keep sharing those media files!

MediaLab Team

Jun 21, 2019
DevelopmentNews