EditShare vs. Ensemble Video

The companies with whom I work that do not use Wiredrive use Simian, Get-A-Reel and in one case, a proprietary platform designed in house. These systems are not as fast, the content not as well organized and the analytics not revealing. These are the issues I bring up with these companies and the questions I would pose to a prospective user

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.

• An easy to use and in-depth online library for our work. Fully customizable, we can add tags/credits to each piece of work for further organization and sorting.
• The project side of Wiredrive is perfect for our clients needs. We are able to upload all required work to one place and send out customizable presentations to each client with their own logo.
• Interfacing with new or prospective clients is easy with the customizable presentations.

• 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.

• Bulk delete is certainly something to be looked at. This could be made easier.
• Thumbnail customisation on project folders.
• Thumbnail customisation for videos stored.

• 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.

I feel we are only scratching the surface of the current offerings, so further investigation is needed. Also, future developments and current impressive client base are additional selling points.

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

We selected Wiredrive because of the fantastic customer service.

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.

• All positive. Users and clients love it!

• 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.