muse.ai provides video hosting and streaming for
businesses and individuals. Using muse.ai, users can store, share, and
embed videos and video collections. It features content based search that lets users find moments of interest.
Includes a lightweight video player that supports
adaptive streaming, subtitles, search, chapters, casting to remote
devices, and call-to-action. Users can embed interactive video collections and playlists. The embeddings are
responsive by default and…
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Vimeo
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Vimeo is a video experience platform. They enable anyone to create high-quality video experiences to connect and bring ideas to life. They proudly serve their growing community of nearly 300 million users — from creative storytellers to globally distributed teams at the world's largest companies.
Initially, it came down to the price. Muse.ai was $60 a year vs $200 for Vimeo. (Wistia is even more). Muse.ai may not have as many bells and whistles and options as Vimeo BUT they have everything I need for video hosting for videos on my blog, for my clients and within my …
Muse.ai offers a great option for video hosting for videos for bloggers, online content creators, course creators, coaches, online marketers, or anyone needing to host videos on a secure, fast, efficient, easy to use and affordable platform. The price is super affordable compared to other video host platforms. Muse.ai offers many features and functions for video hosting including some video player customization, public, private and embedded only video options, different sharing options and auto transcription. I have not found the automatic transcription/captions to be very accurate so I still use another program for my captions and manually upload them. (Muse.ai does offer the option to add your own captions so this is not an issue for me and only takes a couple more minutes time.)
For an overall professional appearance of Vimeo, I think it looks fabulous for the clients we work with. I think it works extremely well to host videos for courses and training that can be paid training. The privacy feature is great for that. I've never used it for going LIVE and wonder if that might be a good option for businesses but since I haven't tried it, I'm not of the capabilities. And I'm not sure how the clients are able to get on the LIVES. It does have so many new features since I started 4 years ago, and that means that there is a higher learning curve if you want to make full use of this platform.
User-friendly interface for administrators of the account and external viewers. Being able to easily navigate a new platform or software is ideal for anyone.
Seamless sharing and embedding across many platforms. Vimeo is well-recognized so it makes it easy for other platforms to recognize Vimeo. The compatibility is outstanding.
As an administrator of the account, being able to select viewing privileges may seem like a basic function, but it's so necessary right now with how heavy our organization is utilizing the platform. We can mass upload content early and only release it for the public over time by simply changing it to a public video.
Price - For the full featureset of Vimeo, you will be paying $900 a year as of 2020, and this is expected to only go up over time. Thankfully, Vimeo offers lower tiers with less functionality, and most people will not need the unlimited streaming viewers or whopping 7 TB of storage that you get for the highest level of membership. But it is still a premium price for a premium service.
"Suggested" Algorithm - The equivalent of YouTube's suggested videos feature is the Vimeo Staff Picks, which recommends curated content from their team of editors. While this content generally has a high level of production, it is not especially relevant to the video you are watching, or to your watch history as a user. I rarely watch suggested videos in Vimeo.
Search - The Vimeo search page is beautiful, having huge thumbnails of videos with a clean, visually-appealing layout. However, the results themselves leave much to be desired. When I search for "jung" to try to find videos on Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung, of the first 18 results, not a single result is actually about C. G. Jung. On Youtube, the first 14 results are all about Jung. When I search for "c. g. jung" on Vimeo I find a number of relevant results, so it's not that the videos are not available in Vimeo. Rather, the search algorithm is not returning relevant results.
I usually extract the links of all lectures from the embed code, but now Vimeo is not allowing that feature. Instead, I have to copy the whole embed code and then extract the URL from the embed code separately. This process has become cumbersome and a bit of hassle since I don't need the whole embed code.
The design is clean and intuitive for the most part, which allows for ease of use by both novice and experience users. We are grateful for the ways that the front-end video player is easy to navigate and intuitive to use, and the backend is generally designed the same way. Tools and options are where you expect to find them, and it was easy to navigate the storage on the backend through folders and content filters
Vimeo does well in performance with systems with ease. I have not encountered any issues with loading pages or slowing down in other software or systems.
Terrible support. When I subscribed to Premium we were guaranteed support. However, after the first e-mail I received from them, I never heard from them again. I sent several emails over the course of a couple of weeks acknowledging that due to covid, I did not expect a miracle overnight and that I was keen to work on the issue with them. I have not heard from customer service at all. This is very disappointing. We lost customers due to the poor quality of the livestreams and were left to sort the issue out without their help.
Vimeo does provide the legwork of content curation and management of sources. The quality of content is not bad from a viewer's point of view. I think the analytics could use a little bit of improvement, only because my department has a lot of users.
Initially, it came down to the price. Muse.ai was $60 a year vs $200 for Vimeo. (Wistia is even more). Muse.ai may not have as many bells and whistles and options as Vimeo BUT they have everything I need for video hosting for videos on my blog, for my clients and within my member website for my online courses, classes and workshops. It is very easy to upload, customize, choose your settings and grab your embed or share links for your videos on their platform. I have only had to reach out to their customer support a couple of times, but each time I received a fast and friendly response.
YouTube was the platform we primarily used previously, after having restrictions and having locked out of a couple of accounts we needed a better platform. We also lost some of our videos. We also have an internal app to track client videos and Vimeo supported it better. With the increased storage and the number of videos we create, we decided Vimeo would be better.
Everything works fine in Vimeo, and the users like the quality and sound of the lectures when viewed on Absorb LMS. They can view the lectures on the desktop and mobile devices.
