The 5 Best Dacast Competitors & Alternatives in 2022

The rise in the popularity of video has created the need for online video platforms. They help organizations to stream and manage their videos over the Internet effectively. The most common one on the list of online video platforms is Dacast.

Dacast is mainly a video streaming platform that helps you upload and stream live and on-demand videos, monetize and share them. Dacast usually targets the media entertainment industry, religious organizations, sport and fitness, and corporate use cases.

It’s a great platform if you’re looking to carry out live streams. But, it lacks a few crucial features. And that’s why you should look for other Dacast competitors as well before making the final decision.

Why Should You Look for Dacast Alternatives

If you’re an organization that

1. cares about video-sharing security,
2. wants to maintain the record of recorded meetings,
3. needs flexible deployment options,
4. and more interactivity & AI solutions,

Then, unfortunately, Dacast is not the best option for you.

Here are a few reasons for which you might consider alternatives to Dacast:

• Dacast promotes itself as one of the leading live-streaming platforms, yet it doesn’t provide basic features like live chat & setting up backup streams

• Lacks in securely streaming videos internally

• Dacast is only deployable on an AWS-provided cloud, cloud and does not provide organizations with the option to manage their data or deployment.

• You don’t have any control over how your data is handled & stored; It only allows integration with Zoom for live streaming & not for ingesting & managing recorded meetings.

• No SSO integration

• You can’t add quizzes for training or have custom security policies

• You can’t define role-based access controls

• No SCORM support & LMS integrations

• No Artificial Intelligence features  

• No audit trails, customizable retention policy, security and privacy policy  

If you’ve any of the concerns mentioned above, or anything else that made you look for other options, you have come to the right place.

This blog will look at alternatives to Dacast for video content management and its streaming over the Internet. We’ve compiled a list of the five best Dacast competitors doing well.

Quick Check: Why VIDIZMO is a Better Alternative to Dacast

Let’s say you want to stream a video internally for training. You want to add a quiz to it and make sure only select 50 people can view it and no other.

Also, you need to ensure compliance requirements at the same time for personal data - maintain logs of who viewed your videos.

Maybe, you’d want to play the video alongside a course in your LMS. You may want to transcribe the videos for Section 508 or ADA compliance. Lastly, you’d like to ensure that these videos are encrypted end-to-end. All of this might not be possible in Dacast, and you might need to look for an enterprise video platform like VIDIZMO.

Before we move on to the comparison, let’s look at what features are needed in a video platform in today’s day and age.

Comparison Criteria

If you need to stream video within your enterprise, it’s important to look at these features when you are comparing Dacast with other video platforms:

1. Security Features:

   Based on the CSO State of Cybersecurity Report 2021, 71% of organizations are to increase their spending on security. With cybersecurity threats on the rise, organizations greatly focus on IT solutions with robust security features to keep their data safe.

2. Compliance Requirements:

   GDPR sets a fine of €10 million for less severe infringements and about €20 million for more serious ones. Whether it’s HIPAA, GDPR, or any other compliance, your video platform needs to have the capabilities to help you safeguard your data from unauthorized use.

3. Data Hosting Options:

   If your organization is operating in a regulated environment, it’s important to have a range of options regarding where your data is stored and streamed.

   For instance, under GDPR, your video data needs to be stored and streamed within an EU data center. You may also need to store data and stream it on your premise for certain compliances. As such, you would need an on-premise video streaming server.

4. Video-Sharing and Access Management:

   Your video platform should define for every video who gets to see it and who doesn’t. This access can be assigned to individuals or groups synced from your SSO or IAM system. A more advanced platform would define what a user can do once they have access. Would they be able to download the video and share it ahead or not?

5. User Experience:

   A video platform is of no use if your organization’s users or end audience needs to break their head just to use it. YouTube sets a good benchmark, and you should look for a platform that offers a YouTube-like portal with simple UI for users to upload and access videos view them from any browser under varying bandwidth conditions.

6. Integrations:

   Video doesn’t operate in silos, and you also don’t want to keep multiple copies of the same video in different systems. That’s a nightmare for compliance, and it also eats away storage. Integrations can help you embed videos and play them in your LMS or CMS, or can help you connect your CRM to add forms in your videos.

7. Artificial Intelligence:

   In today’s day and age, you can benefit from AI to speed up repetitive processes for you. Today it is limited to automatic generation of transcripts and closed captions, redaction of faces and objects inside videos, and improving video search.

Top 5 Dacast Competitors That Offer Better Features than Dacast

1. VIDIZMO

VIDIZMO is a Gartner-recognized enterprise video platform that offers capabilities to stream videos for all end-to-end video use cases in an organization. Whether it’s live streaming or on-demand streaming, embedding marketing videos on your website, or sharing training videos with internal employees, you can do it all with one platform.

VIDIZMO is much better for private video streaming to authorized individuals from your organization. You get an internal YouTube-like video portal that users can access only after they log in. These users and groups can be synced with your SSO or IAM system, making it great from a security perspective. For every video, you can define access as who can access them and restrict downloading, sharing etc.

On an organizational level or department level, you can define policies on how videos will be used – for instance, you can restrict users to sharing videos externally. All videos are encrypted using AES and streamed in transit using SSL.

Leading Organizations Such as The US State Department Trust VIDIZMO for its Security – View VIDIZMO Customers

VIDIZMO solutions are available as SaaS as well. Lastly, you can even stream videos on your premises.

Strengths:

• It offers both internal and external streaming, where you can secure videos to authorized individuals only.

• For individual videos, you can set their availability as public if needed for one-off instances.

• It offers a customizable online video player. You can brand accordingly to include your color and fonts, and choose the buttons that appear on the player, such as playback speed options, skip options, closed captions etc.

• It offers a simple YouTube-like UI to watch, upload and manage videos.

• Unlike Dacast, where you can only generate a single link for sharing, VIDIZMO allows you to generate multiple links for a single file. 

• GDPR and HIPAA-compliant streaming.

• VIDIZMO provides guest sharing, where users outside your organization can temporarily log in to view a video.

• You can define organization-wide policies to govern how videos are used, shared & accessed. This includes blocking downloads and setting a custom video availability and retention period.

• You can integrate your existing corporate training tools, such as your LMS. 

• You can benefit from AI-based redaction for objects, faces and on-screen text in video files. This helps in the redaction of PII for compliance purposes.

• To enable video-based learning, you can organize videos into courses and add quizzes, timed annotations, or handouts.
  
  

• You get AI-generated transcripts and closed captions, with an option to choose from around 80 languages.

• It offers scalable interactive live streaming with support for a wide range of encoders, eCDN support, live chat, QnA and drone streaming.

• You get a white-labeled video platform that you can customize and brand according to your liking. Include your fonts, colors, logo, host it on your domain and do more.

• You can automatically ingest recorded meetings from Zoom and make them available in your on-demand video library.

  

Weaknesses:

• You get limited tools for monetizing your content. Nevertheless, you can monetize your videos, but it’s not recommended if you have a full-fledged monetization use case.
• It only works if you need to use one platform in the cloud, with a few videos being monetized and the rest being used for other purposes.
• It has simple content creation tools, and for more advanced content creation, you’d need to integrate with external tools. However, you can import SCORM content created from various tools.

2. Vimeo:

Vimeo is a simpler Dacast alternative, great for streaming videos to an external audience. It includes options for both live and on-demand streaming of videos. It also offers an enterprise package for large organizations that are looking to stream videos for their employees internally. 

Strengths:

• All videos are optimized for playback using transcoding, CDN delivery and adaptive bitrate streaming technology.

• Vimeo has a simple and easy-to-use interface for uploading and streaming videos to external audiences.

• Their enterprise package includes options for streaming videos to internal audiences as well.

• Great content creation tools are offered in Vimeo by default.

• It offers both live and on-demand streaming for videos.

• It offers a range of features to allow you to monetize your video content.

• You have got features such as pay-per-view and subscription VOD for both live and on-demand videos.

Read more on Vimeo monetization features.

Weaknesses:

• You don’t get automatic transcription for videos in multiple languages.

• You can’t add quizzes to videos, but you do get the option to add timed comments for interactivity.

• You can’t integrate with your LMS or CMS.

• You can’t store and manage videos in your account within any cloud provider or on your premises.

3. IBM Cloud Video:

IBM Cloud video is an alternative for organizations that want to benefit from similar capabilities offered by Dacast and at the same time want their data to be stored in the IBM Cloud.

IBM Cloud was recognized as a niche player in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Infrastructure and Platform services. IBM has over 60 datacenters in over 18 availability zones worldwide, and these offer top-notch capabilities to keep data secure and compliant.

Strengths:

• It offers both live and on-demand streaming to external and internal audiences.

• It has great video access management for internal videos, where you can define for every video as to which users or groups can access them.

• Unlike Dacast, you have the option to integrate with your SSO or IAM system to manage user and group identities better.

• Unlike Dacast, you can choose where your data is stored in one of IBM cloud’s regions. This is great for organizations that have strict compliance requirements.

• You can add AI-generated closed captions to videos.

Weaknesses:

• You can only host videos in the IBM cloud, which some may prefer.

• However, it’s not best if your organization trusts any other cloud provider or needs to stream videos on your premise.

• You have very limited branding features to customize the appearance of your video portal.

4. Brightcove:

Brightcove is an OTT and media-focused alternative to Dacast. It’s great for streaming videos to a public audience for entertainment purposes. You get multiple monetization features to insert advertisements into your video content. You can always get a sneak peek of their platform by visiting the Premier League video section created using Brightcove.

Strengths:

• It offers both live and on-demand streaming.

• It has options to allow you to automatically create beautiful public sites like YouTube through a few simple steps.

• You can monetize your videos through various features, including integrations with Google Ad Manager, server-side ad insertion and more.

• You can share videos through a single link and easily embed videos on your site for streaming.

Weaknesses:

• The platform focuses more on public streaming for OTT and media streaming use cases.

• It’s not the best for streaming videos inside an organization for training or corporate communications.

• It is only available as SaaS, and you can’t install it in your data center in the cloud or on-premise.

5. Wistia:

Wistia is a great platform to stream videos for marketing purposes. It allows you to create a video site or channel with your videos. 

You also get much detailed video embedding capabilities as compared to Dacast. You can choose between simple video embedding, an in-line or popover video embedding. It’s packed with these great capabilities that you won’t get in most video cloud storage options.

Strengths:

• Allows you to create stellar video channels on your site.

• It has rich video embedding options beyond the simple embedding that most platforms offer.

• You can add time-coded comments to videos for better collaboration.

• You can integrate with marketing tools such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Marketo, Google Analytics and more.

• Wistia also offers a great recording tool called soapbox, which can help you create and share videos within or outside your organization.

• It also provides great capabilities for uploading and sharing videos for those one-off instances.

Weaknesses:

• It doesn’t offer live streaming, and you’d need to create videos and distribute them for on-demand viewing.

• It doesn’t offer capabilities to create an internal on-demand library for your employees—no SSO or IAM integrations, as well as detailed video access management.

Conclusion

If you are already using Dacast or are looking for solutions similar to it, you can explore VIDIZMO if it suits your use case. While Dacast streaming services are sufficient for video monetization, VIDIZMO is an ideal solution for sharing, organizing and communicating through video.

Both VIDIZMO and Dacast have free trials that you can avail of.

Take a 30-day free trial to explore VIDIZMO’s video streaming and content management system, or contact us today.

Dacast and VIDIZMO are a few video platforms amongst many in the market. Learn more about the market in our detailed guide to video platforms for 2022.