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.
I'm not sure what the average user is looking for, but I can imagine a number of scenarios for which the platform offers a very flexible hosting service for a variety of users, with plenty of bells and whistles, for a reasonable costs that can protect content while offering a good interface between the publisher and their viewers.
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.
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.
Immediate response from a knowledgeable rep - not a tier 1 automaton reading a script. I can, and have, reached them at all hours by phone, by chat, or by email. Responses are under 24 hours and frequently less than 1. And stuff gets DONE! I see things I request in almost every monthly release.
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.
I looked at Wistia. I did not like that there was no way to call them. They answered all my questions via email and several times didn't even answer the question that I asked in the email. I had to write 3 times to try and get an answer 1 question. There was not a payment interface that worked with their hosting. I would have had to go to another company. Ruduzku: they appeared to have too much of their own branding on the course pages. Other companies: took a percentage of video sales and appeared to do marketing or sent my customers to other competitors. I did not need anyone to do my marketing. I read a ton of reviews for other companies. I picked Niche Video based on a single comment from a user who said they used it at their community college. That seemed to be a model that would work well for what I wanted to do. Then I approached them and had a demo and again I saw they actually answered their phones
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.
Our impact is operational efficiency/employee efficiency. We don't need to upload a video in Dropbox and download and review for each person, and approve, follow-up on 100+ emails. This channel helps to keep all the internal communications review process in one place.
Obviously, The channel help us with the security risk, we can't afford to let the video go out of the channel while it is in progress.
