BlueJeans Events (discontinued) vs. Kaltura

BlueJeans Events is really well-suited for large attendance virtual events and meetings. It was perfect for many of the classes I've taken, as well as hosted, especially during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, where oftentimes in-person classes and interactions have been limited. I love how BlueJeans Events fosters meetings and interactions for large numbers of individuals, despite the fact that in-person meetings of this size have not entirely been feasible during the past year and a half.

Incentivized

Kaltura is an excellent tool IF you have a large library of content. It can be pretty pricey so if you are early in launching an online program you may be better off waiting a few years until you've amassed a large enough catalog to warrant the investment in such a tool. The tool is best purchased by a University or company-wide vs having a single department try to find the budget for it. The unlimited plan pays for itself in most cases if you go this route. Secondly, you must be willing to invest time and resources into on-going training for your faculty and staff, especially for those who wish to create their own media and use the quizzing features.

Incentivized

• Automatically generated reminder emails to registered attendees before the event.
• Easy to host a panel and have them meet before the event goes live.
• Moderator chat allows for those running the program to chat without all of the attendees seeing. This allows for you to address technical issues, program flow, etc.

Incentivized

• Very easy to use interface for uploading videos or capturing a screen recording. There are very few clicks required to get the media up and running. The video conversion process that happens on the back-end is fast and provides videos in device agnostic formats.
• Integrates well with other systems, such as our Moodle LMS. This extends the capabilities of the LMS and also allows us to keep video/multimedia content organized in a central location (the KMC).
• Kaltura can be connected to various processes within your organization. For example, we have a system in place that allows a video lecture in a classroom to be uploaded to Kaltura in a very easy manner.
• User/role management is very important as some people on campus have more privileges to publish content than do others. We have Kaltura connected to our Single Sign-On solution for authentication and we can assign roles to specific people within the Kaltura software.

• Reliability is the biggest challenge I see with BlueJeans. There are times when BlueJeans seems to handle the demands of a big company seamlessly, but then there are other times when BlueJeans runs into issues that I've seen affect entire offices for extended periods of time which creates a challenge for the teams who depend on BlueJeans to effectively run their remote meetings. While in the grand scheme of things, these outages have been few and far between, when they happen people aren't able to start their BlueJeans meetings and have to scramble for an alternate way to meet (while attendees are simultaneously having issues trying to dial into the BlueJeans meeting).
• Aside from the occasional outage, the quality of the video and audio is pretty solid. With variables that are likely outside of the BlueJeans product (office connectivity, bandwidth issues, internal routing) there are times where BlueJeans would either lag or echo which would either impact the output for the host of the meeting (who likely has a room full of participants) or multiple attendees. It would be great to see BlueJeans enhance their packet handling in these cases to prioritize audio over video (and perhaps auto-adjust video quality when there are bandwidth issues).

• As it relates to the LMS integration, we would like to see improved workflow. But that may be just as much a Canvas issue as a Kaltura issue.
• I would like to see the ability to add inline, anchored comments to the video timeline.
• We are seeing issues with compatibility with certain browsers - especially Chrome. The faster Kaltura can move away from Flash the better.
• The capture appliance (CaptureSpace Lite) needs to be reconsidered. It's not intutive enough.

Incentivized

We use it frequently and it has its advantages so I don't see better options for some kind of meetings. The quality of video and audio are great and that's what is very important to us. We like thing being professional. BlueJeans is simple and rich in possibilities. What's more, BlueJeans support is great and professional, they don't forget about their customers.

Incentivized

The choice to renew our subscription does not belong to us, though we are able to provide input. We are aware of competitive products who have matured in the past three years, and we are aware now of alternatives to conventional plugin usage (LTI).

This rating comes from end user experience. When they step into a meeting, they get asked to put in SSO credentials if the meeting is restricted. In many cases, the meeting is open to anyone and staff needs to enter a name to continue. Some staff will forget to add a name and come in as a Guest. Call in options will only provide the phone number for the person calling in on the participant roster. This overall can be a little confusing for some, but to others this is a great service.

Incentivized

BJ Events is Available always when we need it. There was no situation that we encountered an error or an outage. How are you doing this? :)

Incentivized

I think that BlueJeans Events is 7/10 because it's pretty efficient. The audio and video quality is pretty great. I've only had a few connectivity issues but otherwise, it's performed fine. The features are also impressive; I am a huge fan of being able to record my calls so that I can refer back to them whenever necessary.

Incentivized

I really like site bluejeans.com and how simple it is.You can find there instructions, tips and how to create event or secure it! Of course FAQ is always useful and that's what you can find there too! Of course there is contact to support team which I remember was great and professional. Support Team really cares about their customers and don't forget about them. It feels like you can always count on them and reach out with any kind of question(s) which I think is very important.

Incentivized

The first line support agents seldom are able to diagnose or troubleshoot any problems that we have. These agents simply open support tickets in their system which are escalated to a foreign level 2 support agent which creates at least a day delay between reporting a problem and getting initial feedback. Any back-and-forth questions add at least another day delay.

Incentivized

Important to gather all infroamtion from client and ensure all basis are acknowledged before actually doing the installation of equipment

Incentivized

BlueJeans Events is an all-in-one platform that works well when used as a moderator and as part of the audience. The feature that was useful was the practice session it allowed us to do for our tech check. Made the day of our event less stressful.

Incentivized

Kaltura was the best option given the sheer volume of people we needed to support digitally. Others were better in their own regard, but due to limitations in number of attendees or sessions, Kaltura was the best option

Incentivized

We've been using BJ Events with big event and it worked as good as smaller one. All meetings were international and it didn't seem like it at all, I mean the quality was great. Maybe time delay was noticeable sometimes (sound to video) but it might also be caused by poor quality of internet connection.

Incentivized

• There has certainly been significant cost savings on travel, particularly for internal communications. We have also found that BlueJeans has been better than other client systems like Webex. For example, we regularly switch to using BlueJeans over customer systems (Webex, Skype for Business).
• Certainly meetings are shorter and more productive, specifically our daily standup meetings with remote users.

Incentivized

• Managing video content with the KMC has greatly reduced the amount of hours previously needed to manage.
• User issues ie: uploading video, viewing video has been greatly reduced.
• Increased user engagement with using video in LMS courses. We currently have 6,929 videos on our system. Last month , 2/1/14, 17,623 videos were viewed at least 75% of the way through.