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July 28, 2008, 04:08 PM ET
Patent Filing Suggests Apple Is Exploring New Lecture-Capture Software
A patent application filed by an Apple employee details software that would capture video and slides from college lectures and automatically edit them into video podcasts.
The application, titled “Automatic Content Creation and Processing,” was unearthed this month by AppleInsider. The name on the patent application is Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering. An Apple spokesman could not be reached for comment Monday, but the company is notoriously tight-lipped about products that are still in development.
Apple already runs a free service called iTunes U that helps colleges around the country manage online offerings, and several companies sell software that helps capture lecture video and slides as well. One unusual feature described in the new patent application, though, is the ability to determine automatically when to run video footage of the professor speaking and when to splice in images of lecture slides. As the patent application puts it, the software would determine “a time to switch the first and second streams from the event data.”
Many college officials are looking for easy ways to record large numbers of lectures and offer video or audio recordings to students. The goal is to capture and distribute lecture podcasts without requiring professors or other staff members to perform time-consuming editing or file management. —Jeffrey R. Young
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