IBM Watson Media's Video Streaming

IBM Watson Media's Video Streaming is excellent for broadcasting video behind a gate while also providing smooth functionality. It offers many customizable features for various needs within our organization and for providing informational videos to our audiences.

The off-air feature allows for select videos to play prior to scheduled broadcasts--essentially, it allows for teasers/trailers to play before the actual featured videos. This proved extremely useful for our organization to provide a looping informational trailer before we launched our scheduled programming.

In addition, the live feature integration is phenomenal. The platform integrates with Zoom and this feature takes precedence over scheduled playlists which is a exceptional aspect because the user has the ability to schedule transition videos of specific slides that will be interrupted when those on the Zoom side are ready to go live. My organization used this for a live Q and A session to further engage the community and spread awareness of a lesser known form of dementia.

Finally, the support team was beyond responsive and accommodating. Any and all questions we had with setting up the platform, hammering out the details, and configuring the videos to run smoothly were addressed by the communicative and attentive IBM support team.

Overall, this is an incredibly advanced and feature-packed platform that would serve any and all video requirements an organization may need. It is well worth the investment and I highly recommend it.

My organization used the platform for a major educational video premiere, and the capability to stream for large audiences simultaneously while incorporating live elements was extraordinary. We are incredibly pleased with the end result and the virtual event kicked off without a single hiccup.

We used it for a 2-hour premier of a movie and a zoom Q&A panel to major healthcare institutions around the country. We were looking for a reliable platform to provide the utmost clarity in streaming of a motion picture that was made. Also integration with Zoom was important.

Our event was not that large. We had 100 online at same time and it was flawless.

I manage live streaming for our university’s central communications office. I’ve used Ustream/IBM Watson Media's Video Streaming to centralize the streaming of major university events to one channel. I’ve also helped our smaller division set up their own channels for their events.

[Updated review on 10/2020: I decided to update this review after IBM stripped one more piece of useful functionality (a simple YouTube integration) without notice this week, and after many months of glitches in their web CMS and cloud platform. We have been a "metal plan" (self-serve) customer for years, and unfortunately, I can no longer recommend this product that deliver excellent performance for a good price. The price now is too high for what it currently delivers, relative to market peers. Save your money and look elsewhere if you're budget is below $20K per year for a live/VOD platform for your company.]

We’ve greatly benefited from this scalability during our graduation ceremonies. Rock solid performance.

[Updated on 10/2020: Yes, while IBM can handle "massive concurrent viewership", if you have the budget for it, it's web and CMS infrastructure has significant glitches and, in some cases, its engineers haven't even deleted or removed feature buttons that the product no longer supports, and it makes it confusing to our teams when we try to onboard new users. It's bizarre, and reflects poorly on the IBM brand.]

Ready For Spanish uses IBM Watson Media streaming to teach our weekly kids Spanish classes to our online subscribers. This platform is used by our online teachers and allows us to broadcast and embed our pre-recorded and live Spanish courses.

Yes. We are able to host multiple users in our online Spanish classes. This is one of the major reasons we chose IBM Watson Media.

My church uses IBM Watson Media's Video Streaming to webcast all public assemblies for Bible study and worship of the church that meets at 138 Providence Road in Oak Ridge TN. We are a congregation of about 145 members drawn from Oak Ridge, Clinton, and Knoxville and surrounding rural areas. The webcast serves members who are homebound or otherwise unable to attend in person. We also make the assemblies available to interested people around the world.

IBM’s video streaming service is cost-effective for us since we are such a small congregation. We are able to use open-source free products to support our video stream, making this a uniquely accessible approach to a service that is of primary importance to our mission statement.

Our organization is not large, in fact, it is small. We appreciate this service more based on the fact that we are able to use such a powerful capability despite our modest size. We find that this supports us at our current size, yet offers a huge growth potential if we change our model of webcasting in the future.

We livestream a range of events, from our graduation ceremony to live Q & As. Essentially livestreaming gives us wider access to our stakeholders, be it colleagues, families of our students, prospective students or current students themselves.

We've streamed events to audiences from 2 people to 100s of people and the scalability has always been reliable and of ease. For example we streamed our graduation to multiple countries to hundreds of families who couldn't make the event. We've streamed TED talk stye events to a wide number of schools and even a Q & A around apprenticeships to one individual school - all of which scaled up/down in terms of interactivity/views easily.

We use IBM Watson Media's Video Streaming for our weekly Sunday Service broadcasting, and occasionally special events. We are able to use IBM's tools to track viewership and even integrate the stream and chat function into our website to reach people all over the United States. This is especially great for our elderly community and the rare occasion services are canceled due to bad weather.

Being a medium-sized church, we don't see a large amount of viewership, e.g. more than 100 people per stream. Even at a small scale, we've found that we've been able to have a plan that works well financially, and when our number of viewers is above average, the cost associated is very reasonable.

At St. Patrick's Cathedral, the video streaming service is used every day for daily Mass. We also stream organ recitals, music concerts, and special occasions. Yes the streaming service is used by the entire organization. The biggest problem addressed is sharing the good works of the Cathedral with those people who are homebound or live in another part of the country or world.

Like I mentioned before, it the large amount a viewers during our live stream, it has worked perfectly!

We use Watson Video Streaming just once a year for our high school Senior Signing Day event in May of each year. It is pretty easy to navigate and the guys on the service line are great. They really want to help resolve your issue in the best manner possible. We stream our two-hour event for parents who are at work and attend the live event or other family members living outside the area and can't attend. We fundraise and take comments during the live stream. As I said, I really like the folks on the helpline.

We are a relatively small public charter school. We had 72 graduates this spring and we live streamed our Senior Signing Day. This is an event when all students present where they will attend college. Some students perform skits, other do dance routines, some prepare 3-minute videos. All this is live-streamed to our school constituency i.e., parents, grandparents, our other schools, and everyone who could not attend the live event because they live outside of northeastern NC area. We have even had former teachers watch from Zimbabwe! We get great comments from viewers that we answer in real-time as well.

We use video streaming for the online classes that we offer as part of our Master of Biblical Studies curriculum. Our online students can watch the classes live, or they can watch a recording of the class at their earliest convenience. We connect two IP address cameras to the video streaming platform (one on the students and one on the professors), and we control the cameras with an iPad. We also connect to the professor's computer as a Remote Desktop (3rd camera) to show PPT slides that he is showing to the class.

Our organization has not benefited from this scalability when streaming live events because we only stream to a limited number of students who are given the password to the channel (the class they are taking). However, we have had a couple of events that weren't password-protected, and the stream easily facilitated the numbers that were watching.

We use IBM Watson Media Video Streaming to be able to provide parents and staff the ability to view significant public events in real-time and in recorded formats. Often parents and off-duty staff and even staff who are not able to leave classroom situations are able to view and participate in activities provided by the Overbrook School For The Blind and are able to view events in a time convenient to them. Students get a real kick out of being able to view performances that they were involved in after the fact. It is a bonus that the video and audio are crystal clear.

Our audiences generally comprise of family members of students and viewership is small but very appreciative.

We are a multi-site teaching facility. IBM Watson allows talks and presentations from one site to be streamed to other locations or to staff members at home. Due to the low-cost hardware required, any PC and a simple capture card, it outweighs more expensive solutions.

The subscription model grandfathered in from Ustream prevents massive concurrent viewership as bandwidth is limited, and exceeding that, it increases costs dramatically. If this has now changed, this hasn't been communicated well.

We use the IBM Streaming platform annually to provide a way for sick or incapacitated members of our congregation to see and hear our High Holy Day services in the fall. Our health-challenged congregants appreciate this service, as it allows them to feel like a part of our community even though they can’t physically attend. The service also helps those who find themselves out-of-town during the holidays.

We don't really count as an organization that uses or needs massive video capacity. I'm glad, however, that the ability is there because it gives me confidence in the system's reliability.

I use the streaming platform to stream user test sessions to our research partners and across the entire company. It enables everyone to see our testing as it's happening, to see our methodologies, and to communicate our test results live.

We have always been able to stream to as many users as we needed, so the software is truly excellent for this.

We use it for our annual conference, which takes place once a year. We live stream the sessions over a 4 day period. It gives us the ability to allow anyone to view our broadcast (with the link). Also, nice to allow comment streams.

We've never had a complaint about the speed of service. We only typically have up to 100 simultaneous viewers, but the process is pretty smooth and seamless.

We live stream our women's wrestling matches to audiences that pay for it.

Yes, we are still trying to find the right price to charge and trying to figure out the best perks on our end, but live streaming is going to be a big part of what we do for matches and interviewing personalities within the wrestling business and outside of it.

Its being used by all departments. It provides great search-ability functions that are highly utilized. It is an excellent tool to provide all staff and the public access to council meeting livestreams and minutes that has an excellent timestamp feature that saves a lot of staff time when reviewing previous council decisions.

Yes our organization has benefited, we have members of the public and absent council members view the meetings live if they are unable to attend.

We utilize IBM Watson Media's Video Streaming to distribute the live and archived streams from our weekend services to our website. This format is being used across the entire organization and we have found that it is a reliable resource in communicating with parishioners and other interested parties who could not attend the live event.

We are a very small organization so we have no opportunity to test this option.

We have used Ustream for our weekly streaming broadcasts of worship services. It provides a platform for us to use this technology to increase our worship attendance and also provides access for those who are home-bound or traveling. Since our physical location will not allow us to increase in size, we had to introduce streaming in order to not stifle our congregation's growth.

When we started streaming we were only reaching a couple of dozen views a weekend. Today we average well over 175 per weekend. That really like having another entire congregation or added worship service.

Our Church, Grace Fellowship Church, currently uses USTREAM to stream service to our website.

USTREAM has not helped us build our viewing audience and the majority of our viewers now view our services on Facebook which is not done through USTREAM.

I am a self-employed business owner who regularly uses a live stream platform for masterclasses and events. I required a non-VOIP platform as I add a good deal of music. My offerings with crystal singing bowls and vocals as part of the work I do were distorted on other platforms and I've been very happy with Ustream.

I don't feel I have anything pertinent to add here.

It is used to live stream our Sunday services and events where some family member can't make the service. The services are then available for on-demand viewing.

Yes, we have. It has enabled us to get our message out to traveling/homebound members. It has also allowed us to provide family members or friends access to a marriage or loss of a family members service.

We started with Ustream many years ago. It worked great. We transitioned to IBM when they bought out Ustream. It worked OK for five months and then fell apart. We broadcast all our services at Victory Baptist Church over the web. People can watch from around the world.

We used to benefit, but since December of 2018, the service has been unsatisfactory. They can't produce a decent video and they can't send a decent video to YouTube.

We are using USTREAM as a ministry to deliver our church services and special programs to our congregation that are traveling and more importantly to our homebound members. Our members continually tell us what a valuable service and how meaningful this is to them. One of the most important features is the ability to have the services recorded and available on demand to time shift delivery to our congregation and potential members. We have one viewer in another state that is providing a financial donation to help support this ministry.

We have been using IBM Watson to stream video for our monthly meetings, and it has been a great hand in recording passed meetings. The history and library can take you back for recorded meetings. I liked that it was cloud-based, and was able to access content anywhere we were, and also that it supports PC and Mac.

We had really benefited from using this service with not only saving the videos of past meetings, but also reaching out with the steaming link to most of our affiliates and partners during meetings. Also, we can look at the analytics and know how many people are viewing or attending the meeting.