Likelihood to Recommend Amazon S3 is a great service to safely backup your data where redundancy is guaranteed and the cost is fair. We use Amazon S3 for data that we backup and hope we never need to access but in the case of a catastrophic or even small slip of the finger with the delete command we know our data and our client's data is safely backed up by Amazon S3. Transferring data into Amazon S3 is free but transferring data out has an associated, albeit low, cost per GB. This needs to be kept in mind if you plan on transferring out a lot of data frequently. There may be other cost effective options although Amazon S3 prices are really low per GB. Transferring 150TB would cost approximately $50 per month.
Read full review JW Player has flexible plans that won't cost you a lot of money. If you are a startup, JW offers a variety of plans that will suit your specific needs and grow with you as your company grows. You do not need to be a video expert to understand how to upload a video, which allows nearly anyone in the office to do it.
Read full review Pros Fantastic developer API, including AWS command line and library utilities. Strong integration with the AWS ecosystem, especially with regards to access permissions. It's astoundingly stable- you can trust it'll stay online and available for anywhere in the world. Its static website hosting feature is a hidden gem-- it provides perhaps the cheapest, most stable, most high-performing static web hosting available in PaaS. Read full review Responsive HTML5 Provides share functionality built into the player Platform use enables playlist functionality and playlist players which can be customized or versioned for specific uses Videos uploaded to the JW Platform automatically provide multiple image frame options for selecting video thumbnail Read full review Cons Web console can be very confusing and challenging to use, especially for new users Bucket policies are very flexible, but the composability of the security rules can be very confusing to get right, often leading to security rules in use on buckets other than what you believe they are Read full review Definitely missing the ability (in and easy way) to have clickable links in the video. Analytics is a little cumbersome and not very user-friendly. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Just made the decision to renew given demonstrated improvements being made to the platform to expand compatibility for its player use on devices such as Apple TV, as well as improvements made recently to its JW Platform Dashboard
Read full review Usability It is tricky to get it all set up correctly with policies and getting the IAM settings right. There is also a lot of lifecycle config you can do in terms of moving data to cold/glacier storage. It is also not to be confused with being a OneDrive or SharePoint replacement, they each have their own place in our environment, and S3 is used more by the IT team and accessed by our PHP applications. It is not necessarily used by an average everyday user for storing their pictures or documents, etc.
Read full review Reliability and compatibility on a majority of platforms. Would have received a 10 except recent versions of browsers such as Firefox are now defaulting against Flash components and thus prompting approval from users BEFORE loading which is a HUGE obstacle to an effective user experience thus creating concerns by end-users unnecessarily and risking that they will NOT accept the prompts, thus leaving unable to view video content hosted using the JW Player. Assurances by JW support suggest they will resolve this, so we'll see...
Read full review Support Rating AWS has always been quick to resolve any support ticket raised. S3 is no exception. We have only ever used it once to get a clarification regarding the costs involved when data is transferred between S3 and other AWS services or the public internet. We got a response from AWS support team within a day.
Read full review Support is reasonable. I from time to time have made suggestions on improvements that would be nice to see (like the ability to have a clickable link within the video - that is easy to create, without tons of coding) and it seems as though I never see it happen or get much response to "suggestions" to upgrade the software. The good news, other than a few things as I mentioned above, overall, I don't have many "technical issues" in the platform, which is a good thing. On occasion, I have seen some "issues" with the delivery of the video, but it has been pretty scarce. So it is dependable.
Read full review Implementation Rating One of the primary features promoted by JW Platform is its SEO definition. However, there did not seem to be a way to integrate that data to our platform if selected thus only leaving the benefits of that data to be established on the individual video page hosted by JW Platform, which isn't useful in the end to the client value we are trying to deliver for our
VideoproFile.net solution
Read full review Alternatives Considered Overall, we found that Amazon S3 provided a lot of backend features
Google Cloud Storage (GCS) simply couldn't compare to. GCS was way more expensive and really did not live up to it. In terms of setup,
Google Cloud Storage may have Amazon S3 beat, however, as it is more of a pseudo advanced version of Google Drive, that was not a hard feat for it to achieve. Overall, evaluating GCS, in comparison to S3, was an utter disappointment.
Read full review JW had more player options, a better/more intuitive user interface, was altogether faster both in rendering the uploaded videos and in time to load on the web page. The integration with
OpenX for pre-roll was faster and easier than with
Brightcove , and lastly, they offered a great price for service.
Jim Cairl Director, Online Advertising and Operations
Read full review Return on Investment It practically eliminated some real heavy storage servers from our premises and reduced maintenance cost. The excellent durability and reliability make sure the return of money you invested in. If the objects which are not active or stale, one needs to remove them. Those objects keep adding cost to each billing cycle. If you are handling a really big infrastructure, sometimes this creates quite a huge bill for preserving un-necessary objects/documents. Read full review JW Player has was less expensive (without sacrificing quality) than our previous video platform so the ROI was instant. We were easily able to add a variety of video advertising options including pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll. The quality and consistancy of the look of the video has enabled us to grow our video views by well over 100% since starting with JW. Read full review ScreenShots