Dacast

An excellent product that has it all; well, almost everything

Comments: I would summarize it as: Excellent provider, excellent service, excellent cost-benefit ratio. Excellent business partner

Pros:

Very easy to use interface. Excellent seaworthiness. Excellent results and performance. Optimization of resources and transparency of information resources.

Cons:

This is the only area of ​​opportunity that we find in the service. There are currently many plugins and add-ons that other providers can be added almost immediately. We are sure that the Dacast team will be able to work on these integrations soon. A specific example was the real-time CHAT service that should be optimized as soon as possible

A Little Rough Around the Edges, but Fantastic Value for Money

Comments: Dacast helps our team keep focus and lets us fully control our content, while keeping videos private and only accessible to our team. I've been quiet pleased with how seamlessly we were able to integrate it into our training materials in the place of YouTube.

Pros:

Dacast is a great platform for hosting and live streaming videos. You can control the style of the video player without any third party branding or recommended videos like YouTube has. It creates a lot more streamlined and focused viewing experience for employee training videos.

Cons:

The overall polish of Dacast could be improved. Changes to video info isn't always saved the first time. Uploads don't always finish uploading the first time. Processing to full HD quality can take a while too. The product works well overall, but it could use that extra bit of fine tuning.

Expensive and outdated technology

Comments: We finally gave up using them in 2023, after nine years with the company.

Pros:

We began using Dacast in 2014 when live streaming was something really unique.

Cons:

Dacast has raised their prices, lowered their level of service and failed to keep up with latest technologies. The product seems to be a cash cow they are milking.

Dacast meets our small business needs

Comments: Our clients aren't made of money, so we needed a streaming platform that would allow us to stream community/local events and not lose money on the deal. Customer service is good. The platform is not super polished compared to some competitors, but we've seen many improvements over the last 2 years.

Pros:

We needed a simple and affordable platform for live streaming events. While Dacast isn't perfect, the streams are reliable and that is very important to us. There is not much else to say, it meets our needs!

Cons:

Connection times to viewers to the streams have been long (30 seconds to minutes to connect) even with the most recent update to their platform. Reviewing data for how many viewers watched each event is clumsy, especially when we have back-to-back events on the same channel, but still want to see the data separated. Splash screens take a long time to load on the streaming pages. Backoffice tasks can be accidently missed because each section of settings requires you to press a save button at the bottom of the page. Subscription details aren't explain very well, for example if you purchase a certain package you get data but it's parcelled out over the year, not given to you all at once to use. This results in overage charges but fortunately you can enable protection to add data automatically when you run out so your streams never go down.

A decent live streaming and video hosting company for professional use.

Comments: Overall the service has been reliable but lacks some features and convenience that I expected at this price point. I am currently looking for another cheaper provider for my live streams.

Pros:

What brought me to this software was the integration with InPlayer, which allows monetization of live streams and videos. We were looking to quickly deploy a Dacast workflow for a football team that wanted to charge online viewers and Dacast worked well in that application, both reliability and monetization features. The cost and reporting of bandwidth is transparent.

Cons:

The control panel seems a little buggy with some changes requiring to confirm with a button at the bottom, others do not. Changes take a few seconds to take in order to do anything else with the page. In general, the control panel could use some work. I would like to see the ability to email the stream encoder settings to yourself or an app that allows you to see the settings. The recording feature has been unreliable with some missed portions and multiple recordings for the same stream. YouTube was able to record the stream reliably.

Streaming without copyright hassle

Comments: Dacast did work for our events and the support team took one's best to care about us buying the right plan. Yet we try to move our viewers to move to a traditional platform and deal with copyright infringement beforehand. With 15k viewers bandwidth goes like nothing.

Pros:

Dacast is easy to use and does work for any stream that has to deal with copyright infringement and similar issues on traditional streaming platforms. The mix of advance-payment and subscription is ideal for repeated streaming with small audience.

Cons:

Bandwidth gets very expensive very fast especially when streaming for a great audience. Mind your projects beforehand and do the math with included stream calculator. Also there is no way to verify the spent bandwidth since you will not receive any logs.

Works as expected

Comments: Very good so far, as I said befor low latancy and easy to use.

Pros:

low latancy, easy to use. Works really well, never had a critical problem.

Cons:

Sometimes the user interface needs some fixing

Awesome platform better price than Vimeo but wasn’t our best fit

Pros:

Pricing & storage was the biggest attraction point for our ends.

Cons:

Bandwidth cost became a concern due to viewership integrating with the software we were using.

Excellent entry-level introduction to Live Streaming behind a paywall

Comments: We were able to offer live videos of our event to out of town guests at a cost where our in person guests wouldn't have been offended and try our a new service that we could benefit from a good ROI.

Pros:

This was my organizations first time trying to profit off of a live-stream and the paywall feature DaCast offers was the perfect fit. They have the ability to social share to Facebook and Twitter as well as embed the videos into our own website! Customer service is always available and promptly responds when I was setting up the account.

Cons:

The videos were sometimes slow to load. Setting up the channel to save or download the videos after were also not very clear and ultimately resulted in us losing one video.

Good Value Streaming Platform

Comments: Using it as a "set it and forget it" platform for live streaming our church services has provided a cost effective solution that helped us navigate the COVID days, and continues to provide a convienence to our church members.

Pros:

Dacast provides the fundamental features needed to live stream events at a price that is reasonable.

Cons:

The bandwidth and storage entitlements (and cost associated with overages/extras) required us to limit our use of the platform to live steaming. We would have liked to use the session recording and video on demand.

My Review

Comments: I have used this product for about 10 years. It can get the job done, but it kind of drives me crazy with all the little things that could make the product better.

Pros:

It gets the job done. Things have improved over the years.

Cons:

The software is not "polished" These areas need work on. -1. Uploading. It would be nice if when it says the uploaded is “Completed” that it is actually visible in the list of videos. Sometimes I have had to wait 4-5 minutes after it says completed. I have sometimes started a second upload because I think the upload failed. 2. Renditions – It would be nice if I could create a recipe that will not create a rendition. We do not need renditions. 3. Thumbnails – It would be nice if creating thumbnails from the video actually worked the first time you try. It will work on the second try. 4. Deleting Files – It would be nice if we had the option of permanently deleting a video instead of having it go into the trash bin and deleting it a second time. It would really be nice if DaCast could manage our storage and delete the oldest video when we exceed our storage. 5. It would be nice if the Dashboard Top Videos actually showed a thumbnail or something else besides an encrypted name. Example “ vod-ad757efa-055f-5315-862e-b1cf21a010cf” 6. It would be nice if there was a checkbox to use the file name (minus the extension) as the description.

Seamless Integration with Reliable Performance

Comments: COVID nearly killed our performance hall. The move to virtual and now to live& virtual has been highly profitable and has increased our audience numbers and loyalty. We are also very impressed with tech support, they are knowledgeable, quick to respond, and most of all, patient with those of us who are new to live streaming.

Pros:

We broadcast live events to over 100+ virtual ticket holders. Errors, glitches and dropped feeds would not be tolerated and result in numerous ticket refunds. In the several years we have used and relied on Dacast there has been 100% uptime with not one error or dropped feed. Our virtual audience loves the reliability.

Cons:

Testing the feed is not very intuitive. However, since the reliability is so strong we have learned to trust that everything is right on performance night.

Ease of use at an affordable price

Pros:

Dacast is very easy to implement across all our different websites and on all of our devices. And their customer support is always there if you need assistance.

Cons:

I would like a way to see if a live stream is active on the dashboard under the Live Streams. And I would like to be able to setup users to have access to their live streams recordings only.

Best Service Available

Comments: I've checked out virtually all other services. They all have their pros and cons but I've found DaCast has far fewer cons. Pricing is the biggest difference. DaCast is actually affordable for any kind of broadcast and combining that with the solid reliability puts DaCast way ahead of the rest. We continue to check the other services, as the years go by, but we keep coming back to DaCast. There's just no reason to go anyplace else.

Pros:

We don't broadcast often, but when we do, we need to know that our CDN is solid with little chance of dropping. DaCast has proven their reliability, to us. We started with them when they first came on-line. Back then, there were little hickups as would be expected. In my opinion, DaCast is superior in every way to all other similar services. We did a week long broadcast recently, and had zero drops! Those were 12 hour days and not one drop. That's amazing. Setup is easy and quick. I setup a new broadcast channel in about 10 minutes and was testing the broadcast. We use Wirecast and DaCast is simple to interface with it. Support is available via chat and is pretty quick to connect and help you. That's huge when you're in the middle of a broadcast and need help.

Cons:

The only con is in setting up overage protection. You can select it, and it appears that you have it, but you might not actually have it and there's no way to know that you don't. Until you go over your allocated bandwidth.

Live Streaming of Construction Site

Comments: Similar story as the pros listed above. We plan on using this at jobsites in the future as well.

Pros:

We were tasked with finding a way to provide residents of a retirement community the ability to live-stream progress of their new construction site. I came across Dacast and was very impressed in all aspects. Support was quick to resolve any issues and questions. The residents have provided raving feedback and it has truly been a bright spot in their lives. These are residents that may often struggle to keep themselves entertained and occupied, especially during our brutal winter months, so this has truly enhanced the lives our client.

Cons:

The understanding of data consumed can be difficult even w calculators. Unless you're familiar with bitrates, viewer counts, etc.

Dacast is simply amazing

Comments: Software is reliable and church members have become accustomed to the great service.

Pros:

My church have used Dacast livestreaming for about 3 years now and we are very pleased. The stream is smooth and reliable. There are never any interruptions to the service. Quality product and excellent customer service. I highly recommend Dacast.

Cons:

I love everything about this software. No complaints here.

Church livestream

Comments: Overall this has met our needs and at a reasonable rate.

Pros:

We live stream to our web page to make our weekly and special services available to those not able to attend live. We also hope tat those who have not had an opportunity to attend our services will see the broadcast and give us a try.

Cons:

Recent changes made to the software made opening the analytics a chore.

A Great Streaming Solution

Comments: We have had a great experience with DaCast streaming as a service. From our 24/7 streaming to our occasional LIVE event broadcasts, we find that DaCast helps to supply our needs for streaming to our audience. The customer support with DaCast has been excellent, with quick responses and very knowledgeable to help us troubleshoot and get things set up when we started the service. Overall, we are thankful and grateful for this service and support team.

Pros:

We provide 24/7 streaming to a wide audience internationally as well as in the USA. We had a streaming provider that began to be too costly for what we did as a non-profit organization. So in our search for a better provider, we found DaCast to be the best solution for our needs at a great rate. With flexible plans based on bandwidth, and the ability to make unlimited events, for us, this works great! Now we can continue to make our 24/7 streaming available to our audience thanks to DaCast.

Cons:

The only thing we did not like was that DaCast did not have their own broadcaster box to connect to our Sony Camera to stream directly from our camera to the live event. We had to use our computer to stream and eventually found a third party broadcasting box solution that integrates with DaCast streaming service.

Dacast is very reliable

Pros:

Dacast is very reliable , great costumer support, great dashboard. I only can say positive things about the service.

Cons:

Latency. If the latency can come down to 1 second or less, will be super.

Best bang for your dollar

Pros:

Easy to use, customer support 24x7 and no advertisements.

Cons:

I’ve had a few issues with lag on livestream, however most often it works as expected. I know they are currently in the process of upgrading this though.

Reliable Streaming Platform

Comments: We use Dacast on bandswith.com to stream concerts. It's working well so far.

Pros:

It's intuitive and reliable. They also offer a 1-month trial which is helpful to test the quality of the service. The player is sometimes very slow to download;

Cons:

Sometimes, the dashboard doesn't load. There are glitches here and there

Best deal I’ve found

Comments: Love it. Easy to use system even for beginners. COVID forced us into a crash course in live streaming our weekly services and Dacast was easy to setup and bring online. Dacast is very reasonably priced since we just needed a single site stream feed for a small number of viewers. We don’t use the recording option. Pairs well with OBS and OBS lists Dacast now in their stream provider options list. Flawless performance for a year now.

Pros:

The price can’t be beat for what we needed. Serves our minimalist utilization. Super fast tech support.

Cons:

As a novice user, the analytics are confusing. But it’s not a deal breaker.

Best quality service I have used

Comments: I had never heard of Dacast before and decided to take a chance on it. I was amazed at the quality and wondered why my previous experience with other platforms was not as good. I donate a lot of streaming time to non-profit organizations and I have to pay out of my pocket for them. I use Dacast for the most important ones.

Pros:

The interface is so easy to use and gives all the important information and control functions at my fingertips. The quality is amazing. I hear more accolades from the viewers than with any other platform.

Cons:

I wish it was less expensive. I use it for all my high end broadcast. I would use it for everything if I could justify the costs.

Great Live Streaming/OTP Platform

Pros:

Ease of use, support, features, price, stability, quality of the service.

Cons:

Not really at all, maybe the low latency streaming could be aprimorated.

Amazing platform

Comments: I'm using it for 3 years now and I'm fully happy with DaCast! Value for money is the best that I was able to find, setting up only took few minutes and I'm using it for streaming TV program for 3 years without any problems.

Pros:

Easy to use, affordable, stable and support is always ready to provide assistance

Cons:

I would suggest only few modification on user interface (website) in order to have the most useful options in a single page.