JW Player vs. Niche Private Media Channel (discontinued)

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.

Incentivized

I'm not sure what the average user is looking for, but I can imagine a number of scenarios for which the platform offers a very flexible hosting service for a variety of users, with plenty of bells and whistles, for a reasonable costs that can protect content while offering a good interface between the publisher and their viewers.

• 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

Incentivized

• Answer the telephone and provide technical support very readily. Stay on the line to make sure your problem is solved.
• Hosting with user payment ability to be handled by their site or my site. Don't have to have different companies for payment and hosting.
• Affordable for small business.
• Ability to organize content in multiple ways. Works well for educational model.
• Allows my own branding. There branding is fairly transparent.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Niche could add a more comprehensive online tutorial.
• The Niche Web RTC program is amazing but it would be great if they had an app that would allow mobile devices to also connect even if they dont have chrome
• It would be great if Niche could add a less comprehensive platform only for healthcare applications

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

Incentivized

Because 10 is considered the best rating. Niche Video Media gives good service.

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...

Incentivized

Because 10 is the best.

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.

Incentivized

Immediate response from a knowledgeable rep - not a tier 1 automaton reading a script. I can, and have, reached them at all hours by phone, by chat, or by email. Responses are under 24 hours and frequently less than 1. And stuff gets DONE! I see things I request in almost every monthly release.

It was direct and personal, aimed at solving the immediate task at hand while instructing me how the channel as a whole works in the process.

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

Incentivized

No, the support at Niche Video Media was very helpful during set up.

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.

Incentivized

The access controls of who can view, when one can view, how many times one can view, and from where they can view and also the security, and protecting from download [are better]. The review and approval workflow, editing the videos, blue-pen are all not available in Vimeo Pro.

• 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.

Incentivized

• I believe videos for training will be the way of the future. Once the initial cost of producing the videos is accounted for, other than hosting cost all views of the course will be income.
• I believe creating short marketing videos will attract new customers.