Release Notes: May 2024

Hello Spotlightr fam, it’s time for another edition of release notes.  Our last one was at the end of 2023 and at that time we were on version 5.1.54.  It’s been a little over 4 months since then, bringing us 14 more releases during that time.

Included in those was a major release to v5.2.0 on January 23rd, 2024.  We are today sitting at version 5.2.9.

We had quite a few new features and changes to the app which accounted for the update from 5.1.x to 5.2.x.  Included in that was a completely new student profile page with anonymous viewer tracking, along with a few more updates and improvements.  More on that below.

Some other notable new features and improvements include document downloading, frame by frame navigation, comment reactions, a new way to handle thumbnails, folders inside your projects, and faster upload speeds!

First I’m listing out everything from these releases.  It’s not exhaustive, but includes most things relevant to customers and front-facing.  Then I’ll highlight a few of the new features.  Let’s get into it…

Faster Upload Speeds

We’ve made various infrastructure changes and improvements to improve upload times, especially for those customers in South America, Europe and Asia.  Upload speeds are now up to 300% faster!:

Folder grouping inside projects

Our customers wanted more organization!  We already have tags available for your videos, but folder organization was a popular request as well.  There are still improvements to be made, but we did release the ‘first version’ of the folder functionality.

In the Project listing page you’ll see a new icon where you can manage your folders:

Once created and named, they will show inside your Project where you can populate them with videos:

Download documents

As your go-to video hosting for e-learning and courses, it became clear that our customers needed options for distributing additional documentation and course-work.  By adding documents to your video, they can be downloaded from the video control panel:

Once added a new icon will appear in your player controls.  Once clicked, it open up a control panel where you can download the documents.  More than one document can be added.

New student profile & analytics

Every student (known contact) that watches videos will now get a dedicated profile page that details all of their video activity.  Each profile consists of three tabs:  overview, activity, and combined records.

The overview tab gives a big picture looks at the videos watched by project and some overall statistics and trends:

Here in the activity tab you’ll see heatmaps of each video watched, as well as details on any interactions and engagement taken on the videos.

For example, you’ll se below some sections in yellow which indicate those parts were watched twice.  You’ll also see some reactions left as well as a comment left on a video:

Reactions & bookmarks

In addition to our comments feature, we’ve added the ability to add reaction and bookmark icons to the video.  Now both comments and reactions/bookmarks are available from the same icon in the controls when activated.

Here you can see the comments/reactions panel as well as one reaction that was left which appears on the timeline at the point it was clicked.

Here’s what’s next…

New integrations keep getting pushed out in favor of other features we feel are more widely requested and used.  We are reworking the way our quizzes work with all new analytical data tied into our new student profiles.

Student certificates are coming soon.

We’re also doing some exciting things with AI to help you generate summaries and quiz questions automatically.

We appreciate you!