TrustRadius Insights for Ensemble Video are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Streamlined Workflow: Users appreciate that Ensemble Video has helped them establish a seamless process for hosting videos in various formats, allowing them to maintain a campus-wide standard and cater to students requiring special accommodations.
Stability and Support: The stability of Ensemble Video receives high praise from users, as they rarely need assistance from the support team. However, when help is required, users find the support team knowledgeable and responsive. They have received prompt and accurate responses for even the most obscure issues without further clarification.
Constant Improvement: Users highly value the continuous enhancements introduced by Ensemble Video through new releases. These updates are anticipated to further improve their workflows. Users also commend Ensemble Video's responsiveness to client needs and suggestions, implementing effective features based on customer requests to enhance the service.
Ensemble Video is being used across the organization to simplify course capture, video storage and publishing in the LMS. Ensemble Video offers effective, easy-to-use tools educators can use to create and share "video snacks" that can be used to share ideas and information and reinforce crucial learning outcomes. The Ensemble Video mobile app enables instructors to create video content on the go, for easy and timely video additions to any course. Students can also upload content to faculty using the mobile app!
Pros
Screen capture tools are excellent.
Video Streaming is simple and reliable.
Video Quiz results integrate into the LMS gradebook.
Mobile App is great for instructors and students.
Viewing Reports inside the LMS.
Cons
Custom video analytics.
Artificial intelligence.
Likelihood to Recommend
Ensemble Video will work well for any organization looking to use video to support teaching, learning, and communication. It is easy to use, affordable and their support is great!
Our Ensemble instance is used quite a bit by our campus. Its primary use is for hosting the videos instructors would show in face-to-face courses for their online courses. Faculty who legally own VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, or some other digital format of a video may drop that video to our office (after obtaining permission by copyright holders to show their videos to online courses). Student workers perform the tasks necessary to take that original video and have it hosted on our Ensemble video license. The faculty member is provided a URL to the Ensemble video (which is added to a playlist for the faculty member) to link within the LMS.
We also heavily use Ensemble for ADA compliance. This includes hosting transcribed videos (for which a third-party service is integrated with our Ensemble instance), Kurzweil files, specially annotated PDF documents, etc., to provide a central location for our campus to better serve those students with special needs.
Pros
Faculty bring in a variety of different formats for videos, including VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, MP4, and more. Those at Ensemble Video have helped us to develop a good streamlined workflow to get these varying formats hosted in a central location and develop a campus-wide standard.
Ensemble Video has greatly helped us provide better services to our students needing special accommodations.
Ensemble is a stable product, where needing help from their support team is very rare. However, on those very rare occasions, their support team is very knowledgeable. We had an issue once that I thought was so obscure, but the team quickly replied with the right answer to resolve our issue, without so much as a clarification on my support ticket.
If self hosting the Ensemble Video product, their team will take care of upgrades for you as part of the licensing.
Cons
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.
Likelihood to Recommend
I'm not sure where Ensemble Video would be less appropriate. We've found it to be very effective for our campus-specific use cases. However, the product is very customizable in how a campus could structure their Ensemble instance to match their organization, and how users may be managed.
Ensemble Video has reduced our workload and made our users a lot happier, and, in the end, that’s the real solution. It's being used with as an enterprise software across the whole organization. Ensemble Video has taken our myriad needs and provided a platform that addresses all of them.
Pros
Ensemble Video delivers an easy and fast solution to upload media for educational purposes.
Ensemble Video has succeeded for us where other solutions have failed.
Cons
Include additional training and development sessions.
Introduce additional analytical features for reports.
Likelihood to Recommend
Ensemble Video is well suited in dealing with media needs for all of our organization's needs. It's appropriate in providing a solution for video streaming with the expectation that users can view content from any mobile device.
Ensemble Video is primarily used for hosting and delivering multimedia content in our online classes. A great feature of Ensemble Video is ease of creating submission links and user accounts. This gives us a powerful solution for user submitted content that can then be shared through playlists, links and our Blackboard LMS. With the newer embed options, we've also been using Ensemble Video more in our professional development presentations that are built in Articulate Storyline.
Pros
Adapting to user needs. Ensemble Video seems to always be listening to their clients needs and suggestions by implementing effective features in every system update. Communication seems to always indicate that these features are driven by requests that their customers have made to improve the service.
Client Support - I have an IT/support background and have had to deal with many vendors and external support. Ensemble is easily the most responsive and effective vendor when it comes to support. When needing certain solutions, they have sent code that was in development and not officially released so I could achieve my goals with project videos. Support is always personal, prompt and effective.
Customization. New templates, video players, account management, and embed options have allowed us to use Ensemble Video in a much more personalized way. Early versions of the service had an "Ensemble feel" but color schemes and logos are now able to be changed for a better organization feel.
Cons
Sometimes the wait time to convert videos can take awhile. It's not a huge concern but it is something we usually have to point out to students that are uploading their own videos.
Better file management options would also be nice. Functionality to copy or move video files to different libraries does exist but it can sometimes be a time consuming and tedious process.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Esemble Video is the software we use to manage streaming video accounts for faculty and staff at the university. It is an excellent product that allows us to manage a large volume of videos for the campus. It is user friendly and an affordable option for our campus. We are now also including our materials for ADA compliance as well.
Pros
Ease of use
Many options it affords the user
Affordability
Operability
Cons
Would like not to have to restart the server each week to get the add button to appear.
Likelihood to Recommend
Ensemble Video is well suited for and environment that needs to manage multiple videos which will be viewed by multiple users.
As an Ensemble reseller, we've helped government and education customers deploy video content management solutions (VCMS) using this product. Both installs were across the whole organisation. The university is using it as a replacement for YouTube, within an in-house portal. The government ministry is using it as the front end for a broadcast recording system. We are also working with a service provider to deploy Ensemble as a multi-tenant video hosting solution.
Pros
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.
Cons
The portal feature is not a very good replacement for YouTube. It does a basic job of publishing content outside of the VCMS, but the layout is not too attractive.
There is no ability to search across content collections.
Getting started with Ensemble is not very intuitive.
Likelihood to Recommend
Ensemble Video is best for deployed solutions needing a lightweight video content management solution (VCMS).
We use Ensemble Video broadly. Our faculty uses it to show films and clips of films to students in the academic setting. Our students also use it to watch these films and clips as well as upload recorded projects to dropbox for certain classes. Many faculty [members] link Ensemble Video to Moodle as well for easy access by students in one location. We have a generic library in which all students and faculty can access the films, then we create libraries for various classes and instructors as well as staff members. Some of these libraries are created for personal use and others are used for class-related projects and presentations. Ensemble Video is a wonderful product and has made life much easier for faculty and students at our school.
Pros
Customer Service is excellent. I always my questions and issues are taken care of in a prompt and friendly manner.
The quality of the service is superb! After using other services similar to Ensemble and finding them quite lacking in many areas, Ensemble is a breath of fresh air.
The price is actually quite affordable compared to the quality of service we receive. Alternative services were much more expensive and provided a lot less in many areas.
Cons
The online documentation needs to be upgraded. Often we look for information and can't find anything current.
Likelihood to Recommend
Ensemble Video is well suited in the classroom environment, on the road for student athletes, and in large auditoriums for group showings. I can't really think of a less appropriate scenario - maybe in the woods...
We have multiple degree programs capturing both lecture and technique classes. The videos are then uploaded to Ensemble Video for classes. We also stream live events throughout the year.
Pros
Ease of use. From an end user perspective there really isn't a lot of training needed.
Integration with our learning management system.
Customer support is fantastic.
Cons
A better way of customizing the interfaces.
Likelihood to Recommend
Ensemble Video is well suited for live streaming events and classroom lecture captures.
Ensemble Video is being used as the video-on-demand service for our campus. Faculty members use Ensemble Video to manage and publish their own video content, and students use it as a way to supplement course related video projects. It is also being used as a repository for campus related videos projects.
Pros
Ensemble Video is very easy to use. Videos are uploaded quickly, and ready to share within minutes.
It is easy to create libraries, and assign permissions.
It works well will a variety of web browsers. Our previous video-on-demand system would not work in the most common web browsers; Safari, Google Chrome, Firefox, etc.
Cons
It would be nice if you could sort listings by title, instead of having to do a title search.
Likelihood to Recommend
Ensemble Video has been a welcome change to our campus. This web based service provides us with the video-on-demand capabilities that we were searching for. Professors can upload videos and share them directly with their students, or give them access to the library, and students can use the videos housed within the media library as a way to supplement course related video projects.
Our organization supports the use of Ensemble Video in the K-12 classrooms in Westchester, Putnam & Rockland Counties. We also use Ensemble internally within our department and organization. I often host screen-cast tutorials that I create to help our districts in the many services/software systems that we support.
Pros
Ensemble provides a secure ad-free environment that is critical in the K12 classroom.
Content organization is simple - with Libraries/Playlists/Categories.
Many display options/choices depending on your purpose/context/etc. Portals, Playlists, Custom plug-ins, embedding, single links meet any target need I may have in a simple fashion.
Cons
Honing in on purpose in the K12 Classroom & Ensemble vs. YouTube
Likelihood to Recommend
Ensemble Video is great in my work flow, as with one log in, I manage my tutorials for every single product that I support. These are organized using playlists/categories. I can assign one video to multiple playlists as well which allows for truly custom instances for whatever my sharing purpose may be.
