Ensemble Video is an online video platform that simplifies video management and delivers content any time, over a variety of networks.
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Panopto
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Panopto is a video management platform for businesses and universities from the company of the same name in Seattle, supporting the recording, sharing, live streaming, and (after recording) sharing via LMS or internal video site, video search, and virtual classroom.
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 …
Panopto and Echo 360 are both focused on capture rather than content management. Kaltura is too expensive. Ensemble is a good VCMS without the cost of Kaltura.
Ensemble Video is a superior product. Student athletes can keep up with course assigned videos when traveling, professors can share videotaped presentations with their students, and students can create, and submit course related video projects.
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.
The more I used it, the more I appreciated its ease of use. If I ever ran into a situation that I felt might be a learning opportunity at some point in the future, I would simply log in, record a session, and only allow access if/when it was appropriate later. Since the more recent versions also work on mobile phones, there really wasn't a time when I couldn't record something to review or present later. During covid, teachers didn't have access to their normal equipment, and students weren't always able to get access to a robust recording setup to do their recordings. Some students actually did recordings of presentations in their cars, or in the stairwells. Portability is powerful. I think that we all run into situations where our presentation didn't go quite as well as we had intended. As Panopto grew, they focused more on allowing the user to control their content and perform some basic (I would argue more than basic) editing, which made actions like awkward pauses easy to "fix" as you could create smooth, blended transitions easily.
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.
It captures multiple streams simultaneous (video, desktop, audio only etc) and is pretty smart when it comes to working with imported PowerPoint Decks.
The end product can easily be shared in multiple formats and it has pretty rich content editing abilities for doing basic post-production clean up.
They have recently introduced an in-line quizzing feature which can integrate with your LMS's Gradebook.
The Analytics feature is very strong - we can get student level analytics when we integrate/embed the videos into our LMS.
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.
Panopto has been quick to answer any questions, but their rollouts and updates have caused issues where we felt a little blindsided by unexpected changes. Their development cycle is slow and often their promises for future updates have been extremely slow or never come.
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.
Panopto has the best captioning features that I've seen for a video repository. This enables us to caption videos quickly and efficiently. It also has tags and chaptering which makes viewing videos easier. We can also link videos inside Panopto to outside entities without needing them to have a Panopto account. Panopto works best if you have a LOT of video content, but if you only have some or don't care about organization, SharePoint (or Microsoft Stream) might be a cheaper/more efficient option.
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.
During the pandemic, Panopto allows our faculty to quickly stage up lectures that were normally delivered in person, and these recordings reached thousands of students who could not come to campus for class.
Both faculty and student report high satisfaction with the flexibility and convenience of having Panopto video content available in a course to watch and rewatch for learner reinforcement.
Panopto's adaptable media distribution reduced impact on student technology and internet speeds when they might not have access to broadband connections, allowing them to continue to access essential course materials.
Speech to text capabilities. increase accessibility compliance of media content.
Archiving training materials in Panopto allows faculty, staff, TAs, and students to easily find recordings for reference.
