Uscreen Review: Will This Video-on-Demand Platform Grow Your Business?

Almost all content creators and entrepreneurs looking to launch subscription-based video on demand (SVOD) want to be the next Netflix.

There's nothing wrong with that, but here's the sobering truth about that statement:

It's lame.

Instead of striving to become the next something in the Video-on-Demand (VOD) industry, be the first you by playing to your strengths as a video creator.

And among the different online video platforms to choose from, Uscreen is among the best and most popular in helping creators make money by focusing on what they do best.

But here's the question now: is this video service the right one for you?

Uscreen Review

Who Is Uscreen Best For?

For video creators looking for an OTT platform, VOD platform, or video monetization platform in the market today, Uscreen is a company worth checking out.

Of course, you know this already and need a little more convincing why you should buy (or maybe reasons not to.)

If that's the case, read on because we'll be looking at how Uscreen works and what separates them from other options on the market.

Uscreen Summary

Uscreen is a video management system that helps businesses and companies of all sizes upload and organize content for launching and monetizing an online streaming service.

The tool lets teams use custom website themes, add captions and subtitles, and overlay animated graphics to create episodes or set up trailers.

Uscreen Pricing: Transparent Prices With No Hidden Fees

For starters, the tool offers a 14-day free trial for new users. This gives them enough time to play around with its features to make an informed decision.

Uscreen has three subscription plans for users to choose from: Basic, Growth, and UscreenPlus.

All plans require you to pay an extra $0.5/month per subscriber. So if you have 100 confirmed subscribers after the billing cycle, you'll have to pay $50 for that month which is separate from the amount of your chosen plan.

There's also a 5% Time Sales (TVOD) Fee across all plans. This means Uscreen will only take a fee from every rental or one-time transaction. Recurring subscriptions don't have a TVOD Fee, i.e., you will receive the subscription payment in full.

Besides these things, each pricing plan is transparent as there's no revenue share or hidden fees.

In this part of the Uscreen review, Below are other features included in all plans:

• Upload and encode unlimited videos regardless of length.
• Deliver video content to users via global CDN to ensure the fastest stream possible.
• Allows users to pay using credit cards, PayPal, and international payments.
• Receive subscription payments straight to your Stripe account.
• Access to onboarding and training materials to help users learn how to use the tool faster.
• Ability to upload videos, audio, PDF files, and other media assets.
• Reach out to its technical email or phone support and receive a reply within the day, anytime.
• Choose the language of your video platform.
• Have peace of mind knowing that the uploaded videos on the platform have a guaranteed 99.99% uptime.
• Customize the website with your brand.

Among the three, the Enterprise doesn't have a fixed price. You must reach out to Uscreen for a custom quote that suits the needs of your business.

For the other two, users can subscribe to either one monthly or annually.

Here's the screenshot of the annual pricing plans:

While the monthly plan won't require you to pay for the entire year, it'll be much costlier in the long run than the yearly plan. In particular, the Basic plan's monthly subscription is twice the cost of the yearly one.

Therefore, you must make the most out of the trial period to settle on the right plan for your business and lower costs simultaneously.

Below is the breakdown of the following pricing plans from the available features down to their usage limits.

Basic

For the Basic plan ($99/month, $49/month paid annually), users have 3,000 minutes of video storage. This is perfect for businesses looking to jumpstart their membership site and monetize their exclusive video content.

Users will receive full access to Uscreen's features:

• Video player – Premium video player with tons of options.
• Security – Ensures that your videos won't be stolen and prevents online threats from infiltrating your platform.
• Payments and monetization – Make money from your video content by accepting payments from multiple gateways.
• Analytics – Understand the viewing behavior of your subscribers to know what devices they are using, which videos are the most popular in which location, and others.
• Marketing tools – Launch campaigns to effectively promote your website to your target audience and reduce churn.

From this plan, users also can launch video-on-demand or drip and schedule content straight from the platform. Also, uploading videos in bulk or from your Dropbox drive is possible.

Finally, they can integrate their Mailchimp, and Google Analytics accounts with their Uscreen's for their email marketing and analytics needs.

Growth (Formally Amplify)

For businesses running an established video platform but are looking for more juice from their video delivery service, the Amplify plan ($499/month, $399/month billed annually) is right up your alley.

It gives you 7,500 minutes of video storage — more than enough to host your content library for your video streaming service.

The Amplify plan has everything the Basic plan has to offer and more:

• Customization – Easy-to-customize website to help you design pages from scratch and set custom filters and a master language for your storefront.
• Live streaming – Simultaneously broadcast videos in real-time and record them into VOD.
• Live chat – Interact with your audience in real-time through chat. (As of writing, this feature is still in beta mode.)
• Integrations – Connect over a thousand third-party apps using Zapier. Also, set up affiliate and conversion tracking.

Uscreen Plus (Formally Enterprise)

Have more than 7,500 minutes worth of VOD content? The Enterprise plan will help scale and help your website reach new heights.

As Uscreen's highest plan, it has all the features that aren't included in the previous plans, including:

• Native – Helps you launch OTT apps, allowing customers to sign in to your platform and watch your videos from any device without any developer experience.
• White Label – Ability to remove the “Powered by” message on the footer, allowing users full branding on their platform.
• Developer Tools – Grants you access to Uscreen's public API and webhooks.
• Extended customer support – Receive a dedicated account manager to oversee your platform. Also, offer support to your subscribers as provided by Uscreen.

As mentioned, you'll have to reach out to Uscreen for a custom quote for this plan based on your requirements.

Now that we've extensively combed its pricing plans with a fine-tooth brush let's move on to the fun part by seeing how Uscreen works!

Uscreen Features: An All-in-One Video Platform for Creators

Launching a VOD platform requires your knowledge of video hosting platforms that accept payments from subscribers and customers. You also must ensure that all videos and subscriber data are encrypted and safe from online threats.

Finally, you need to gather insights regarding who your subscribers are, where they're from, what videos they love to watch, and more.

At this point, we haven't even covered the marketing strategies you must implement to drive more customers and keep subscribers from leaving.

And even having secured all these tools, there's a chance that one of these may break, causing your entire site to go down with it!

Therefore, instead of getting access to these features from different places, Uscreen houses all of them in a single place.

Never do you have to worry about keeping everything in place. With Uscreen, all you have to do is focus on creating content your audience loves!

And to see how that's possible, let's look at the tool's core features in this Uscreen review:

Uscreen Video CMS

Upon logging into your account, Uscreen will prompt you to upload your video first to get things started.

You can upload videos to Uscreen at the same time from your local drive or Dropbox account.

Once uploaded, you can organize your videos in different ways.

If you want to use Uscreen as an online course platform, you can organize your videos and compile them into a Collection. 

After describing what your Collection is about, you can upload the videos and create dividers for a sub-group of videos covering a specific topic.

Let's say you want to organize your videos into themes, i.e., separate your videos about SEO, content marketing, and social media into different groups.

This is where the Categories feature comes in handy. You can sort the videos into groups to help subscribers find them much easier.

Another feature that helps with user experience is the Custom Filters option.

Filtering videos based on different factors allows subscribers to browse your content library like a breeze.

Once people sign up for your streaming service, they can access the videos you made available.

Once you have all your videos in one place, it's time to create the website that your audience will visit to view them.

Here, you must put your best foot forward by creating a professional-looking storefront that contains all the information your prospects need to become customers.

This may seem overwhelming to video creators who simply want to get their content across to their target audience. However, Uscreen makes creating a website fun and easy to launch in minutes with a few clicks!

It starts with choosing a pre-made storefront design from Uscreen's theme gallery.

You can preview the design that catches your attention and see if it best captures your VOD service. This way, you can make a few tweaks to the colors, text, and pages, so you don't have to worry about creating everything from scratch.

Aside from these customization options, you can also change the position of the playlist when customers are watching your videos.

There's also a way to edit the categories that will appear above your catalog to help deliver viewers with related content that they can watch.

Let's say you want to change your storefront design but still want to keep its current appearance. You can create backups of your site before customizing it.

This allows you to recover the previous version if you're unhappy with the changes and its current performance.

You can restore the old design just by clicking on the Install button.

Uscreen also makes it easy for you to download a copy of the site and save it on the cloud. This serves as a security measure or free space for more backups to create.

If you want to make changes outside of what the editor lets you do, you can open the hood and edit the site using HTML.

Uscreen is created using the Liquid engine, the same system that Shopify uses. So you better get familiar with it first before making changes here.

Video Monetization

As video creators, you want to see your videos generate ROI after the work you've put into them. While you can set some of your courses for free for anyone, you can create a subscription plan for some of your collections.

Choose the visibility and price of the plan. You can also create as many plans as you wish to help provide more payment features for your audience.

You can also offer your video collection as a one-time purchase or a rental price, whichever suits your business model.

Live Streaming

If you're broadcasting a live event or hosting a webinar to an audience, the tool's live streaming feature lets you do this from your Uscreen account.

This is a great way to increase engagement with your video streaming website. You can use live streaming to either provide exclusive content to your subscribers or encourage people to become one if they aren't yet.

When running live streams or screencasts, you must use an encoding software like OBS to send Uscreen a video feed that will be shown on your website.

You can only record your live stream and add it as part of your VOD collection.

Marketing Features

Just because you created a streaming service for your audience doesn't mean they'll come in driven to sign up and subscribe to it.

You need to advertise it first to raise awareness, thus helping you build a much stronger connection with your audience. Once they're a fan, only then will he or they become customers.

While there are lots of marketing tools you can use to launch high-converting campaigns, Uscreen offers an excellent set of native tools to help jumpstart your strategy.

Choose from pre-designed templates that you can simply edit in minutes before publishing.

For your offer, you can choose among offer coupons, gift cards, or even subscription upsells to squeeze out more sales from your customers.

To help you reimagine your sales funnel, Leadzen allows you to map out your customer journey. This way, all the leads you acquire will flow down your funnel until they reach the stage where they have to convert.

Finally, if your streaming business is bleeding customers, you may first want to collect user feedback to help you get to the bottom as to why they unsubscribed.

Depending on the response, you can launch an abandoned cart campaign to remind prospects to complete their order.

Uscreen can help you get back in the good graces of former customers by offering another free trial to them. This is effective if you improve your services or add new videos.

OTT Apps

Once you have your VOD business set, you want to ensure that everybody can view your videos.

While everybody can access your site to view your content, some might prefer to watch them using a smart TV or casting them from a device straight to the television.

By offering other ways to view your Uscreen video content aside from visiting your web browser, you offer convenience, leading to increased viewership.

With Uscreen's over-the-top applications (OTT apps), you can request apps to be created on your chosen platforms.

Below is a list of platforms where you can request the development of an app for your streaming business:

• iOS
• Android
• Roku
• Apple TV
• Amazon Fire TV
• Android TV
• watchOS Fitness App

The Samsung TV and LG WebOS are still under consideration. However, the available platforms should be more than enough to help distribute your content to your audience for a more seamless browsing experience.

Upon choosing a distribution channel from the list above, Ubot will reach out to one of its salespeople to reach you regarding this request.

Since this is part of the Enterprise plan, you have to upgrade to that plan if you want to use this feature.

Uscreen Integrations

Uscreen lets you automate your workflow by connecting to different apps.

Below, we focus on its most common and valuable integrations.

Zapier

There are only 12 native third-party integrations available on Uscreen.

However, you can connect with more than a thousand apps with your account using Zapier.

It's one of the most popular automation tools that create seamless interaction between different apps.

For example, if you're using a landing page builder to drive more subscribers, Zapier enrolls the users to your streaming service automatically.

This way, you can get more things done as you scale your business.

Mailchimp

As one of the most popular and easiest-to-use email platforms, Mailchimp takes away the pain of sending emails to your subscribers.

All you must do is enter Mailchimp's API, and you'll have full access to your subscriber list from Uscreen to your Mailchimp account.

You can send emails to them from here using the tool's intuitive email builder and other features.

Google Analytics

If you want to unearth more data about the performance of your streaming business, you can connect your website with Google Analytics.

Upon entering your Tracking ID, you get all the details you'll need to measure the number of visitors your site received during a period, how long they stayed, your goal conversion percentage, and more.

Payment Options

You need to connect Uscreen with your payment gateways of choice to process payments from your customers.

By default, you can accept payments via Uscreen. While it's the most convenient solution for payment processing, there are transaction fees you will incur on top of the $0.5 per subscriber and the 5% TVOD Fee for rental and one-time payment transactions.

Ideally, connecting your account to Stripe and Authorize.net allows you to forego some of the charges and accept credit card and debit payments.

However, if the gateways above are unavailable, you can connect your PayPal account instead. While you will still incur fees per transaction, it's much lower than the fees from the default payment option.

FAQ

Is Uscreen safe?

Uscreen efficiently gathers user data and adjusts checkout pages to maximize conversions while protecting this sensitive information with PCI-compliant payment processing. Uscreen creates a secure transaction environment between customers and the brand by providing an enhanced layer of data protection that cannot be compromised.

Is Uscreen worth it?

Uscreen is a robust Video-On-Demand platform that allows anyone to monetize their content and build a profitable online business. The pros of the video hosting service outweigh the cons for those looking to monetize their content, especially if they're passionate about producing high-quality live streaming videos!

How much does Uscreen cost?

The Basic plan starts at $99/month ($49/month billed annually), including a web platform, pre-built website themes, and up to 3,000 minutes of video storage.

The Amplify plan ($499/month, $399/month billed annually) has more premium features like Zapier integration, live streaming, and 7,500 minutes of video storage.

Finally, the Enterprise gives you access to OTT apps, public API, and webhooks. Reach out to Uscreen for custom pricing for your needs.

What is Uscreen?

Uscreen is a video management tool that helps businesses of all sizes upload and organize content using filters to facilitate online streaming. The tool lets teams use customizable themes and add captions and subtitles for more engaging videos. You can also overlay trailers in the form of episodes, so you allow your subscribers to binge your video collection in one go!

Uscreen Alternatives.

This Uscreen review isn't complete without the alternatives of this video hosting platform.

If you're still unsure whether or not this video hosting service is for you, below are some of its fiercest competitors:

• Vimeo OTT – Aside from giving you the ability to host and share videos using its secure, ad-free player, Vimeo lets you create a subscription-based streaming service so you can monetize your content. For $75/month billed annually, you can also run live streams with live Q&A and chat.
• Muvi – Similar to Uscreen, Muvi is an all-inclusive video hosting service that lets you stream video and audio content without any coding experience. Prices start at $399/month with an additional $299/month per OTT app and Infra Fees.
• Intelivideo – This VOD service is geared toward fitness instructors looking to build a subscription-based system for sharing their training videos. It offers a health and fitness feature set to help monitor and track the performance of your clients.
• Odeum – Unlike most video platforms, Odeum allows users to build a video membership website at no cost to you. You'll only pay if you exceed an hour's worth of video upload to the site. There's also a 10% revenue share and tiered subscription fees.

How Good is Uscreen as a VOD Service Platform?

As content creators with ideas of running streaming services for their business, you want a solution that takes care of the technicalities involved in setting up your streaming platform from scratch. Uscreen is the solution you should turn to.

From this Uscreen review, it should be clear that its features help you build a subscription-based video-on-demand business under your brand without any programming knowledge or experience.