Cincopa vs. Ensemble Video

Cincopa is great for small businesses that need to post photo or video galleries on their websites. Cincopa can do many other things, however, I have only used them for photo galleries. Cincopa also makes it easy to post a video on websites.

One of the main reasons we were drawn to Ensemble Video was it's emphasis for supporting multimedia in higher learning environments. Unlimited user accounts, security features and the ease of use has made Ensemble Video an effective solution. Prior to Ensemble Video we tested free sites like YouTube and Vimeo. However they didn't have the privacy settings we needed, especially for our user contributed content, and things were not in a centralized location. This made it more difficult to support and troubleshoot with our students.

• Responsive - if your platform is not responsive it will display the gallery this way across all platforms.
• Fast - if you have slow uploads it will increase your load speed.
• Easy - you can upload all your photos at once or one at a time. Then use a preset gallery to display them.

• Ensemble is a really excellent video content management solution for organisations that want to deploy onsite, enjoy a perpetual license and all the features found in competitive products costing many times more.
• Ensemble does not try to be a monolithic application. Instead it leverages Sorenson Squeeze transcoder for ingest and Wowza's streaming media engine for playout. So it's pretty lightweight and is focused on content management tasks.

• Cincopa only allows for one size of photo. For example, if I want to include a vertical photo and a horizontal one, I have to have the Cincopa team custom-code this feature for me. It should be an out-of-box feature.
• Our designer had to put some parameters in Cincopa, so that the galleries fit in well with our website. It's not intuitive to the average person.
• The analytics are very lacking. We have a podcast page where about four to five podcast series live, but the analytics are the same for all of those series because Cincopa only records when someone sees the first slide of a gallery, not individual slides. So, there's no way to know if one podcast is more popular than the other. And, since Cincopa is an iframe, we can't gather this data with Google Analytics either.

• There is one issue where sometimes the 'Add' button to add new media disappears, typically once per week. The workaround is to restart the physical server. While restarting the server each week can be a good thing, it would be nice not to have to keep a reminder on my calendar.

It solved the problems we were facing at the time.

Cincopa is very easy to use, especially to the uninitiated. You don't need a degree in CS or years of experience to set-up a fantastic looking gallery. The interface is self-explanatory for the most part and very easy to use. The drag-and-drop functionality makes it simple and inviting for all users.

Incentivized

The team at Ensemble Video is dedicated to supporting us and they offer prompt and reliable services.

When looking for a gallery system on BigCommerce, we looked at POWr, Owl Carousel, and JuiceBox. We settled on Cincopa due to the embed options, drag-and-drop functionality, and the lack of development needed to integrate into our website. Additionally, Cincopa's price point (especially with a free option) put it in the lead over similar products like JuiceBox.

Incentivized

Our campus has been using Ensemble Video since 2008. At the time we were unaware of Panopto or Kaltura, or other services. That said, I'm glad we picked Ensemble Video. Their team has been very supportive of us every step of the way. I'm not saying the other services would not be effective for our campus, but from what I've seen of those other services Ensemble best suits our needs and workflows.

• We use the tool primarily as a customer loyalty measure. Customers can view all submitted images and videos, also from other people and share with other people.
• In addition, the tool serves to promote the image of our company by giving the customer pleasure. The residence time of the customers on the page with the picture gallery is very high.

• ROI is sometimes tricky because systems, once implemented, are never welcomed by end users and thus, the ROI originally foreseen was more idealistic than real. Ensemble Video is almost universally well received by end users and thus, there is a real ROI that mostly relates to institutional effectiveness.