The University renewed its 3-year contract with Panopto, our video management solution, on June 30, 2023. The license fee for the solution depends on the number of stored videos in the account. To lower our costs, the Education Technology Office (ETO) has implemented a video retention procedure, beginning on April 3, 2023, which will affect recordings no one has watched in several years, as outlined below. 

The retention plan for videos currently stored in Panopto consists of three rules: 

1. Videos that have not been watched for five years will be archived.  Videos stored in archive can be restored. See Panopto Guide for more information: How to Restore Archived Content. When a video in archive is deleted, it is permanently deleted and cannot be restored. The retention policy clock for a video will continue running when it is placed in archive, and will be permanently deleted when it reaches 7 years with no views.

2. Videos that have not been watched for seven years will be deleted.  When the policy was put into effect on April 3, 2023, all videos that had not been watched in seven years or more were automatically deleted, in a one-time bulk action. After this date, no videos will be automatically deleted through the retention policy without first going into archive, as per rule #1. When videos are automatically deleted via retention rules, the process is identical to that of manually deleting a video from one's own account. In either case, deleted videos can be restored from the user's recycle bin for 3 months from the date of deletion. See this Panopto guide for more information: Recycle Bin and Permanently Delete. 

3. Watching a video resets the retention policy clock, preventing it from being archived or deleted for an additional 5 years.

Additional Considerations

• Videos stored in a user's personal folder ("My Folder") will not be subject to this policy, and will be retained indefinitely. Keep in mind that videos in Personal Folders will still count against our overall account storage quota, so please do not move videos to your My Folder that you do not expect to be watched in the next few years. Please contact eto@framingham.edu if you would like guidance on setting up a solution for long-term storage of inactive videos.
• Users are also welcome to export video and/or audio streams of their Panopto videos for long-term storage, or storage or use on another platform such as YouTube. See the following Panopto guide for guidance on this process: How to Download Video or Audio Streams as MP4s.
• This retention plan is subject to change at any time.

ETO Responsibilities

The designated Process Manager for Panopto video has the following responsibilities related to the retention plan:

• Manually approve batches of videos for archive and delete, weekly. An email notification is sent to a designated individual.
• Regularly monitor License Plan Usage Hours.