Ensemble Video vs. Vimeo

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.

If you're a small company with one or two employees, I'm sure that Vimeo is great. When it comes to larger organizations and teams, they clearly are treating such customers stepmotherly. You need a basic account in order to be an admin on a Pro-plan team, but you only get basic support (3 days wait). The teams function is riddled with bugs and affects the whole experience. In this case, I would not recommend Vimeo at all.

• 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.

• Image and Branding - Vimeo has always had an edge on design and branding versus its competitors like YouTube. Using Vimeo as a content delivery platform gives the appearance of being luxurious and having a high-end product.
• Video Configuration - I've used YouTube through multiple iterations of their video management and configuration options, and Vimeo has continued to beat it hands down, both in ease of use and robustness. I can easily organize my Vimeo videos into tags and playlists while I still struggle with YouTube, where it is quite laborious.
• User Interaction - Vimeo allows you to capture user email addresses for email lists with ease, something its competitors have not figured out yet. You can easily split your video into chapters and hyperlink from within the video to other areas, features which competitors like YouTube have in some form but not nearly as easy to use or well-implemented as Vimeo.
• Video Analytics - Vimeo has a full-featured analytics suite that helps content creators understand user interaction and engagement with their videos.
• Versioning and Collaboration - Vimeo has workflows for video history and for collaboration where you can have a content creator upload a video which enters a pipeline for an editor to approve. I have not used these workflows, but it's pretty cool that they have implemented features like this.
• Custom Micro-Sites - I have only ever embedded Vimeo videos in websites that I've created, or sent them as links to clients, but I have seen well-designed micro-sites for content creators built using Vimeo. Overall, Vimeo does design and branding very well. Their micro-sites look much better, visually speaking, than competitors like YouTube whose equivalent feature, the YouTube Channel, just seems dry in comparison.

Incentivized

• 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.

• The Vimeo videos do not appear on search engine results, it would be better if search engines can find them.
• The search option can be made better. Looking up for old videos are a hassle sometimes.
• Can have CC autogeneration option, it would be better.

Incentivized

I usually extract the links of all lectures from the embed code, but now Vimeo is not allowing that feature. Instead, I have to copy the whole embed code and then extract the URL from the embed code separately. This process has become cumbersome and a bit of hassle since I don't need the whole embed code.

Incentivized

The design is clean and intuitive for the most part, which allows for ease of use by both novice and experience users. We are grateful for the ways that the front-end video player is easy to navigate and intuitive to use, and the backend is generally designed the same way. Tools and options are where you expect to find them, and it was easy to navigate the storage on the backend through folders and content filters

Incentivized

I use Vimeo all the time, and never had any issues with the system.

Incentivized

Vimeo does well in performance with systems with ease. I have not encountered any issues with loading pages or slowing down in other software or systems.

Incentivized

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

Terrible support. When I subscribed to Premium we were guaranteed support. However, after the first e-mail I received from them, I never heard from them again. I sent several emails over the course of a couple of weeks acknowledging that due to covid, I did not expect a miracle overnight and that I was keen to work on the issue with them. I have not heard from customer service at all. This is very disappointing. We lost customers due to the poor quality of the livestreams and were left to sort the issue out without their help.

Vimeo does provide the legwork of content curation and management of sources. The quality of content is not bad from a viewer's point of view. I think the analytics could use a little bit of improvement, only because my department has a lot of users.

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.

Vimeo is more reasonably priced and a little more user-friendly. Plus, I like the look of it and that I can use it at a price that doesn't break the bank for a small business like mine. It seems to have more features than these other platforms, so you don't have to have so many different platforms just for your video needs.

Incentivized

Vimeo does well with integrating videos in the Absorb LMS that I currently manage.

Incentivized

• 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.

• General membership engagement has increased significantly. We are accustomed to 20-35% of users viewing content and that has increased to about 40-60% within the past 5 months.
• We have found that linking a Vimeo video where the video can be viewed in-app or on the website is when we see most views, rather than redirecting users to the Vimeo account.

Incentivized