Item: IBM Video Streaming
Rating: 8
Author: Clayton Ebeling

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloud Video (including Ustream)

Usability

It's simple. It does what it's advertised to do and just works.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our office (video services) utilizes Ustream to broadcast live events/training/and more for public and internal office use. Thus far it has been reliable and a great benefit to our office. We hope to see it reduce travel costs in the future as it is used more frequently.

Pros and Cons

Pros

We have used it to broadcast live on the side of a road using a 4G wireless card.
Monitoring screen; shows bandwidth, users connected, and compression rate. All useful while streaming live.
Ustream Producer keeps equipment to a minumum. Laptop, HD/SDI to computer interface, and a camera. Simple!

Cons

We look forward to Ustream adding closed captioning (CC) file upload soon, as it is ADA required for our office.

Alternatives Considered

YouTube

YouTube (in comparison to Ustream) is lacking in most areas: Your live broadcast is always in jeopardy of being turned off if someone with access to your account uploads something that is flagged, which could be days before you get it back. The delay time is crazy long, over 1 minute. And the interface/setup is tedious and unfriendly. Though YouTube does have a wonderful CC interface and upload capability.

Likelihood to Recommend

Perfect for streaming live events; the delay time is minimal (in comparison to YouTube) - only 10 seconds or less. Though would like to see a similarly designed interface for closed-captioning (CC) upload and editing of text as YouTube. Our office is ADA required to make all content accessible to disabled individuals. Being able to upload a previously recorded event and add a CC file later for ADA compliance would simplify things for us.

Comments

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Bob Lee
commented 8 years ago
Hi Clayton. I'm Bob from the Voice of the Customer team here at Ustream, an IBM Company. Thanks very much for taking the time to review our platform. We're thrilled that it is meeting your needs and helping you reach folks throughout Minnesota. I've traveled many a mile on your roads and know how difficult it is to keep people in-the-loop in a state as vast as Minnesota. We hear you clearly on the closed captioning issue and hope to have some things to share with you, especially as we work with our colleagues in the IBM Watson team on things like automated speech to text functionality. I will pass this along to our product team and, if you wish, we will re-connect with you soon to discuss this further. Thanks!

Ustream: Simple Setup, Reliable, and Short Delay

Software Version