Kaltura media storage and retention guidelines

Kaltura is a comprehensive, robust, campus-wide media platform, available to all faculty, staff, and students at NIU. With Kaltura, you can upload, publish, share, and edit media, as well as create screen recordings, in-video quizzes, and other types of interactive learning experiences.

NIU faculty, staff and students are encouraged to use Kaltura to create engaging content, build instructor presence and learner community, demonstrate skills, and share knowledge. The reality is, however, that NIU’s institutional license of Kaltura has an overall storage cap above which NIU incurs significant additional charges. As a result, reasonable limitations on media storage are being implemented to ensure long-term feasibility and access to resources.

The intent is to neither stifle creativity and innovation nor force users into other, less useful, or less integrated solutions, but rather to prioritize storage in Kaltura for media that is viewed frequently and in active use. Media that needs to be stored on a long-term basis can be kept in Microsoft OneDrive, where the university has much higher capacity.

All NIU Kaltura users are encouraged to delete unused media from their Kaltura My Media library. In addition, the Kaltura platform will automatically implement the following media retention strategies. Kaltura users who own media of the following type/status, will receive notification prior to any removal of media.

Media Retention Strategies

	FORMER FACULTY, STAFF AND STUDENTS Media owned by faculty, staff and students who have left NIU and have 0 views in preceding 13 months will be deleted.
	NO VIEWERS Videos with 0 views are often drafts, one-time-use videos, duplicates, and other sorts of un-needed video. Unpublished videos with 0 views in the preceding 12 months will be deleted. Published media (unlisted or published to Blackboard or MediaSpace) with 0 views will be deleted after 48 months.
	MEETING RECORDINGS Meeting recordings, such as Zoom, Teams, and Collaborate recordings with 0 views in the preceding 6 months will be deleted.
	COPYRIGHTED MATERIALS Content that is clearly subject to copyright, such as full-length movies and television episodes will be deleted if the media owner cannot produce written copyright permission. This does not apply to media using Kaltura’s YouTube indexing feature.
	VERY LONG MEDIA Media longer than 2 hours with 0 views in the preceding 12 months will be deleted, longer than 3 hours with 0 views in the preceding 6 months will be deleted.

These guidelines were developed with guidance from members of the Innovative Teaching and Learning Advisory Committee and the Online Learning Advisory Council. These guidelines have also been reviewed by the Office of the Provost and the Council of Deans.

Learn more about the guidelines and read answers to frequently asked questions on the media storage and retention guidelines page.