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JW Player

Score9.8 out of 10

15 Reviews and Ratings

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What is JW Player?

JW Player (or JWP) is a video platform boasting 40,000 broadcasters, publishers, and other video-driven brands whose business relies on video as users. It provides these companies with a way to accelerate and scale their video strategy and is a video platform that can be used to stream video, engage audiences on any screen, and monetize content.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features JW Player has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 15 ratings of JW Player's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Video quality / Bandwidth controls

    Streaming is high quality, and users can set default bandwidth for optimal viewing.

    Category average: 7.5

  • Mobile compatibility

    The video player allows viewers to watch videos from mobile devices.

    Category average: 8.6

  • Live streaming

    The platform allows users to broadcast/stream live video feeds.

    Category average: 8.3

Areas for Improvement

  • Per viewer tracking

    Tracks behavior of individual viewers as they engage with videos.

    Category average: 9.1

  • Per video tracking

    Tracks engagement trends across all viewers of a particular video.

    Category average: 9

  • Video analytics dashboard

    Includes a dashboard view of video performance metrics.

    Category average: 7.5

Reviews

What users are saying about JW Player.
View all reviews

JW Player does what it promises!

Incentivized
Bryan Crowe
Digital & Video Specialist in Product Management at Allured Business Media (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Delivers the video/podcast in the best manner it can - streaming cleanly.
  • It automatically converts the video in various delivery formats for different devices.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • It serves our 4 brands well in delivery of both video and podcasts that we produce.
  • We feel it has presented us with an opportunity at a reasonable rate.

Other Software Used

Adobe Illustrator CC, ON24, Adobe Acrobat DC, Adobe Premiere Pro

JW Player - A great video platform

Incentivized
Jim CairlView profile
Director, Online Advertising and Operations at Playbill (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Simple, intuitive User Interface.
  • It's incredibly snappy - almost no load time ever.
  • Time to render and transcode is also super fast.
  • Good service and sales support - the people who came in and pitched to us were knowledgable, flexible, and smart - that went a long way to getting our business.

Cons

  • I could use a little more info on some of the videos. an info panel with things like, for example, bitrate would be helpful.
  • Our previous video player had a publish to YouTube button - so that with one button it took care of a whole other channel. That would be nice to see.
  • I'll be honest, i don't really have a lot of points here. In my experience, it's a solid, all-around well built platform.

Return on Investment

  • We've seen a video stickiness. Users are watching more videos than they were previously
  • Our ad serving solution is smarter, and we have more flexibility about where to slot in pre-roll between videos.
  • Also ad serving related, we have more transcoded sizes to choose from and better overall video quality than our previous provider

Alternatives Considered

Brightcove

Other Software Used

OpenX, Lotame, AppNexus

JW Player- A real player in the video delivery game.

Incentivized
Jim ManneyView profile
Director of Video Content in Professional Services at Forum Communications (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Ease of use: We have several hundred people who use JW Player on a weekly basis and we needed to be able to train them quickly. JW Player is very intuitive and easy to understand.
  • Reliability: We rarely ever have any unscheduled downtime with JW Player.
  • Analytics: We wanted to be able to chart growth over a period of weeks and months and JW Analytivs give us a good view into how our video is being consumed. The realtime analytics are especially helpful.

Cons

  • I would like to be able to follow the analytics of a video series over the course of time. Currently, It's difficult to do that.
  • I would like to have multiple logins for a single account.
  • I don't
  • I don't think there is any revision history. After a video is posted we occasionally need to change a headline or description and the update doesn't show up.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

Bright Cove

JW Player and Platform the BEST alternatives to YouTube, Vimeo or Dailymotion

Incentivized
Ross R. MasonView profile
Chief Executive Officer in Professional Services at Motion Media Solutions (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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

Cons

  • Technical support is extremely slow to respond to inquiries and often does no more than point to existing documentation on its knowledgevbase, which is often inadequate, and slows down proper resolution to issues.
  • No access to cases established for customer record of all correspondence with support.
  • JW Platform Playlist RSS feed is not currently compatible with iTunes video podcast submission parameters which is a real disconnect.

Return on Investment

  • Positive in the sense that we have been able to integrate its use and their platform for our VideoproFile.net client videos hosting and distribution, with far greater functionality and features than just using the stand-alone player as a plugin for the site.
  • There have been some negative impacts such as the playlist RSS feed iTunes incompatibility as already mentioned.
  • Another negative impact on some videos with the JW Platform is its encoding qualities seem to be lesser than popular video sharing sites such as Vimeo, YouTube and Dailymotion; this is only evident on certain videos, however serious enough that the only alternative is to encode our own, load to our own CDN, then load via URL to the JW Platform, then uploading a separate image for its thumbnail. This is a work-around, but seems completely unnecessary given that since most clients are inclined to just use the FREE video sharing sites anyway, we cannot afford to see some videos appear to display blurry images at places within the videos encoded and hosted on JW Platform. This also places a greater burden on us to review every video hosted with JW Platform as a measure of QA...steps we'd prefer NOT to take if we could rely on its quality of encoding matching that of the most popular video sharing sites.

Alternatives Considered

VideoJS, Flow Player and MediaElements

Other Software Used

Box, Dropbox for Business, Basecamp, Smartsheet

Usability

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