Ustream/IBM: Very dependable, needs minor product tweaks

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.]

Yes. We have some annual events, such as graduation, that have done well without issues for several years.

The dashboard is very good but for one shortfall. If you have more than one live event on one day, the analytics for two or more events get commingled. It is hard to separate the data. This has been an issue for years for us. Seems like an easy fix.

[Updated review on 10/2020: Just this past month, the company introduced automated streaming reports that its customers can download in a PDF format. This was long overdue, but appreciated. Before that, we had to download excel sheets, do our calculations, and create reports for delivery to managers.]

We are not using AI & machine learning yet but would like to.

[Updated review on 10/2020: I don't think we are a large enough customer to benefit from this product offering, but I can say we are getting very good quality automated live- and recorded captions from some other vendors whose prices are much lower than IBM's.]