Ensemble Video vs. muse.ai

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.

Muse.ai offers a great option for video hosting for videos for bloggers, online content creators, course creators, coaches, online marketers, or anyone needing to host videos on a secure, fast, efficient, easy to use and affordable platform. The price is super affordable compared to other video host platforms. Muse.ai offers many features and functions for video hosting including some video player customization, public, private and embedded only video options, different sharing options and auto transcription. I have not found the automatic transcription/captions to be very accurate so I still use another program for my captions and manually upload them. (Muse.ai does offer the option to add your own captions so this is not an issue for me and only takes a couple more minutes time.)

Incentivized

• 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.

• user friendly
• affordable
• excellent uptime
• good customer support

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.

• better audio transcription
• more video player customizations

Incentivized

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

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.

Initially, it came down to the price. Muse.ai was $60 a year vs $200 for Vimeo. (Wistia is even more). Muse.ai may not have as many bells and whistles and options as Vimeo BUT they have everything I need for video hosting for videos on my blog, for my clients and within my member website for my online courses, classes and workshops. It is very easy to upload, customize, choose your settings and grab your embed or share links for your videos on their platform. I have only had to reach out to their customer support a couple of times, but each time I received a fast and friendly response.

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.

• saves me several hundred dollars annually compared to other video platforms I previously used ($140 less annually than Vimeo, for instance)
• saves me time in uploading and customizing my videos and grabbing the embed code
• so far, 100% uptime - meaning my clients and customers aren't having issues accessing content
• mobile-friendly video player, ease of use for my customers and clients who are viewing the videos

Incentivized