Brightcove Video is a video hosting and publishing solution. The company also provides a cloud media processing product called Zencoder.
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Crowdcast
Score 9.3 out of 10
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Crowdcast is a multistreaming platform for private, interactive, supports webinars, and has the capabilities to reach any size audience and connect with your community. Crowdcast is designed to help you reach, grow, and engage your audience.
It works very nicely for our company site because it can easily and seamlessly embed into the site and email HTML pages. It also has picture in picture, sharing, closed captioning (CC) as basic functions. It will also show the time of the video. Because these are short-term-use videos or might get updated frequently and also are just targeting a specific audience, being able to hide or not able to show the number of views or date published (unlike YouTube) actually helps us.
Crowdcast does a great job with live webinars and is one of the top ones available. They have continually improved the product and are coming out with a version two now with a cleaner, easier to use interface with some really cool features. The platform works well and most importantly the live webinars come in clearly and almost never fail. In the past year, things have worked very smoothly which is really a relief. As anyone who does lots of live videos knows, it's crucial to have a smooth, easy-to-use piece of tech that doesn't fail like Crowdcast. Chat comes in a lot better and the features are cooler than Zoom Webinars.
Ability to easily output a JSON response for requested video data. This makes it easy to work with Brightcove as partner.
The read APIs are very flexible and can the output can be easily customized using cgi args. This provides great customization of the output and sorting and filtering mechanisms to find the videos you're looking for.
The ability to add captions to videos is good, especially with the regulations requiring video captioning. DFXP support works great as long as the player is given the exact XML format it is looking for.
The code for customizing the video player can be made easier, I think it still uses BEML code.
Easily accessible ready made code will help users like me to implement a cool looking player.
I would love to implement Brightcove video cloud on most of the projects that I work on and I see we could use it in so many different ways but pricing is not easily available on the website.
Again if I could work with someone to price for small, medium and large businesses that would be great.
It took quite some time to upload and organize our video library. The amount of time it would require to relocate all this information outweighs any negative aspect I personally have with the experience. They have been pretty good to work with and from speaking with my Brightcove rep, I know some of the issues I have listed are currently being addressed and tested for future releases.
We are notified often of downtime, and I have not heard from a support rep for over a year. It really makes it hard to learn what new things are coming out and how we can take our video to the next level when there is no contact from the team on a regular cadence.
Marketing department favors it because EVERYONE uses YouTube. Overall, YouTube offers decent features and functionality. But Brightcove offers the ability to brand and style players, and control what our users see (and so much more) and YouTube does not. For instance, on YouTube, users are presented with other videos (which could contain competitor videos).
WebinarJam got really bad the last couple of years we used it (2 years ago). Crowdcast support has been better and doesn't fail like WebinarJam. Facebook had a bunch of issues as well and isn't the ideal solution in my opinion. Zoom Webinars provide a great video feed, but the chat options and overall functionality are limited.
