Brightcove Video is a video hosting and publishing solution. The company also provides a cloud media processing product called Zencoder.
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Wistia
Score 9.7 out of 10
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Wistia is a video marketing platform that helps teams create, host, market, and measure their videos and webinars. Wistia is used to create professional videos, host webinars, collect and send leads to a connected marketing automation platform. Wistia additionally offers customers support and educational resources.
It works very nicely for our company site because it can easily and seamlessly embed into the site and email HTML pages. It also has picture in picture, sharing, closed captioning (CC) as basic functions. It will also show the time of the video. Because these are short-term-use videos or might get updated frequently and also are just targeting a specific audience, being able to hide or not able to show the number of views or date published (unlike YouTube) actually helps us.
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.
Ability to easily output a JSON response for requested video data. This makes it easy to work with Brightcove as partner.
The read APIs are very flexible and can the output can be easily customized using cgi args. This provides great customization of the output and sorting and filtering mechanisms to find the videos you're looking for.
The ability to add captions to videos is good, especially with the regulations requiring video captioning. DFXP support works great as long as the player is given the exact XML format it is looking for.
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.
It took quite some time to upload and organize our video library. The amount of time it would require to relocate all this information outweighs any negative aspect I personally have with the experience. They have been pretty good to work with and from speaking with my Brightcove rep, I know some of the issues I have listed are currently being addressed and tested for future releases.
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.
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.
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.
We are notified often of downtime, and I have not heard from a support rep for over a year. It really makes it hard to learn what new things are coming out and how we can take our video to the next level when there is no contact from the team on a regular cadence.
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.
Marketing department favors it because EVERYONE uses YouTube. Overall, YouTube offers decent features and functionality. But Brightcove offers the ability to brand and style players, and control what our users see (and so much more) and YouTube does not. For instance, on YouTube, users are presented with other videos (which could contain competitor videos).
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.
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.
