Unreliable in core features.
What do you like best?
No other service claims to offer as much functionality in recording, live streaming, and video conferencing from one central platform. If it lived up to its claims, it'd be a great product.
What do you dislike?
Unfortunately, core features are grossly unreliable. If there's one thing you're guaranteed every recording session, it's encountering a bug of some kind.
Ultimately, where it matters most, you're throwing the dice - namely in its ability to record the hosts and guests. Without posted minimum specs, guests on lower-end systems are frequently kicked off due to memory and storage requirements. When they rejoin, Riverside fm is unable to record or interpret multiple files for guests who need to refresh. Under best conditions, where hosts and guests have high bandwidth and computer systems with no interrupts or perceived issues during the recordings, core features work with ~90% reliability. Sometimes files are described as being 100% uploaded, but are unable to be downloaded or are directed to download a missing "xml" file.
Advertised features such as live streaming do not work.
Audience moderation ability is not available, so rogue audience members can disrupt your session. It is also presently impossible to see who is in the audience aside from viewing chat messages and overall session headcount.
Riverside.fm bills itself as a premium service to record wav audio and 4k video. But if you can't access these things with certainty, it's like not having either at all.
A better investment is in buying cloud storage space, and asking guests to upload video and audio files there. Conference and livestream elements are better with Zoom or the next competitor vendor.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
I've added to the bug list for the developers on my own dime - I wasn't compensated for testing reliability or functionality that their service team asked me to do. This was especially disappointing when there are limited hours provided per month on a paid account.
The benefit I realized is that by attempting to fix many of Riverside's introduced bugs and issues, I can do many of these functions without Riverside at all.
