Uses
Screencasts can help demonstrate and teach the use of software features. Creating a screencast helps software developers show off their work. Educators may also use screencasts as another means of integrating technology into the curriculum. Students can record video and audio as they demonstrate the proper procedure to solve a problem on an interactive whiteboard.
Screencasts are useful tools for ordinary software users as well: They help filing report bugs in which the screencasts take the place of potentially unclear written explanations; they help showing others how a given task is accomplished in a specific software environment.
Organizers of seminars may choose to routinely record complete seminars and make them available to all attendees for future reference and/or sell these recordings to people who cannot afford the fee of the live seminar or do not have the time to attend it. This will generate an additional revenue stream for the organizers and makes the knowledge available to a broader audience.
This strategy of recording seminars is already widely used in fields where using a simple video camera or audio recorder is sufficient to make a useful recording of a seminar. Computer-related seminars need high quality and easily readable recordings of screen contents which is usually not achieved by a video camera that records the desktop.
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