Overall Satisfaction with IBM Watson Media's Video Streaming
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.
- Low cost hardware requirement
- Low cost subscription model
- Easy to use
- Automated subtitling included in subscription
- More generous streaming capacity included in standard package
- Better online video management tools - I discovered very old videos were being stored without my knowledge
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.
On some of our sites, we have very poor network infrastructure - such as 100 Mbps LAN. Other streaming solutions struggle to cope with this, often dropping entirely, or producing an unacceptable quality. IBM delivers an acceptable quality stream every time.
As we use this service for internal content delivery, streaming metrics are not something we have ever used or plan to use.
We haven't used Watson's AI for subtitling yet, but I have seen real-world demonstrations. Ultimately, it struggles with poor quality audio - such as air-con noise. It also struggles with medical or scientific terminology. It struggles with the quietly spoken, who ironically are the people most in need of subtitling!