Ensemble Video vs. Wistia

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.

It's so awesome to see my videos come up on Google Search. A click brings viewers right to my website!!! Incredibly powerful. If I were just posting on YouTube, visitors would end up there and then off to the next best cat video instead of taking action with me on my website.

• 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.

• Wistia enables a lot of customization in the video player, making it personalized to your business.
• The user experience is pretty intuitive and easy to use without too much training.
• Wistia's help articles, blog and instructional videos were very helpful as we began investing more resources into video production.

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.

• Obtaining embed codes for a significantly large number of videos can be very time consuming as there is no way to automatically pull a report.
• Within a project, there is no way to set the list to show a specific number of videos and you may only have a certain number of videos shown unless you click to expand the list and continue to do so.
• Once the list is expanded and you click in to a video, when clicking back, the list reloads and you must expand the entire list again which can become very time consuming.

Incentivized

Wistia is super easy to use and very reliable, anytime a video needs to be updated, the existing media can be replaced, but the url remains the same so anywhere this media is shared or embedded, it is immediately updated. Their support is extremely helpful, and there is very rarely any issues with this product.

Incentivized

I just love the interface and the way things are organized. You can find all of the various controls and have the ability to enable/disable each. You can also get to help quickly from any screen. The screens are not cluttered and have a good use of whitepace, without the need to page through controls or reload the screen.

Incentivized

After several years, we have not come across a situation for which Wistia was not available when needed.

Incentivized

Couldn't be happier with the overall performance of the platform. Videos load fast, rarely have loading issues, look sclean and the styling and sizing doesn't have issues. The data comes in quickly and in real time. Also, on the administrative side, the videos seem to upload well without much issue. There's always issues uploading video, but we had way less upload issues with Wistia than with Vimeo.

Incentivized

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

We have only had to reach out to Wistia support a handful of times in the 4 years we have been using Wistia. They have always been quick to respond and help us solve the problem. The system is self-service so there should be very little to no need to reach out to support on a regular basis.

Incentivized

We were in the process of changing our website so that took some time to get Wistia implemented in to our website.

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.

Wistia is in the process of making their livestreaming way better than the free alternative like YouTube and a well known competitor like gotomeeting. It's easy to add in cohosts, interact with chat members, add in polls and other features which can be a bit clunky on gotomeeting.

Incentivized

We use many platforms and Wistia has been a standout in terms of reliability and scaleability.

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.

• Doubled lead capture from lead magnet on website from one year to the next.
• Increased email interaction on newsletters when embedding Wistia video thumbnail into email campaigns (10-15% links clicked bumped to 30-40% links clicked).
• Can save us about 50+ hours of one-on-one client meeting time per year for pointing clients to video content rather than presenting the same info in a live setting.

Incentivized