Archive for the ‘Product Updates’ Category

Non Sequitur Fridays: Who Are You?

Friday, May 24th, 2013

This post is part of our Non Sequitur Fridays series, which will feature a different Wistia team member's take on a non-Wistia-related topic each week. It's like our "employee of the month" but less "of the month"-y. Jordan Munson is a customer champion at Wistia.

"Who are you?"

For me, that's not a really hard question to answer. It's probably not that tricky for you to answer, either. How about this one, though:

"Who do people think you are, based on what you post to social media?"

Jordan As Adele

In this picture on Facebook, my identity was Adele.

Much harder, right? It was for me, too. Not long after Facebook launched for colleges, I started my first year at university (Northeastern, to be specific—go Huskies!) and hopped aboard the Facebook train. At that point, I had no idea what I was doing and mostly treated it like MySpace, posting as much stuff as I thought would make me look cool and goofing off with my friends. I never thought for a second about what folks actually thought of who I was based on that stuff, but I was pretty sure I didn't need to worry since only my friends (folks who already knew me) could see it. In recent years, all of that has drastically changed.

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Add Mid-Roll Links to Your Wistia Videos

Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013

You might be familiar with Wistia's post-roll calls-to-action (which link users to their next destination at the end of your video) and Turnstile (which allows you to collect emails at any point before, during, or after your video), but what if you want to add a call-to-action at an opportune moment as your content plays? The Mid-Roll Links Lab lets you add clickable buttons anywhere during your video and link them to anything.

Use Mid-Roll Links to link people directly to buy a product you're talking about, to a map when you mention a location, to further documentation for a feature you just described, to a talking head's blog or website, or to Rick Roll someone who thinks they're about to view a valuable resource (just kidding, please don't do that).

Read on to learn how Thermo Fisher Scientific and CLiCKPLAY Continuing Education University are already using Mid-Roll Links.

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Oh Caption, My Caption: Closed Captioning in Wistia

Thursday, April 18th, 2013

We just made it super easy to add closed captioning to your Wistia videos! Captions are a great way to make video accessible and they also have major benefits for SEO.

Now you have the flexibility to choose between either captions or interactive transcripts for any of your videos. And even better, you can order the captions from us (just like transcripts) or you can upload (and edit!) your own .SRT files. What's a .SRT file? It's a human-editable, human-readable text file that you can create from scratch.

Wistia captions even work on the iPhone and iPad (in iOS 6.1 and higher).

Using Captions in Wistia

To set up captions in Wistia: first, order a transcript. Then, enable captions in the SuperEmbed Builder (you can choose between captions or an interactive transcript here).

If you don't want to order a transcript through us, you can upload your own .SRT file (a time-coded transcript that syncs the video with the display of the caption text) and Wistia will automatically create the captions for your video.

If you've already ordered transcripts for your video before, the captions for that video are already waiting in your account!

Learn more about how to use Wistia Captions in the video below:

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Introducing Wistia Labs

Wednesday, March 27th, 2013
 

Toss on your lab coat and follow us for a tour of Wistia Labs: a new set of experimental video tools suited for the maddest of web video scientists. (Dim the Lights is featured above!)

It can be challenging to experiment with new functionality within a product when your ultimate goal is to keep things clean and simple. When you've got a quirky, out-there idea, or a new feature that's crazy cool but only a few people will use, how do you avoid cluttering the product? How about features that are super useful but that you might not be able to guarantee compatibility with for every browser or platform?

We already launched the Twitter Follow Lab back in February, and now we're happy to announce a whole bunch of new Labs.

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The New Turnstile: Bringing Email Capture to Video

Thursday, February 21st, 2013
 

Hi, this is our friend Turnstile. You might have met before, but Turnstile has really... changed, so you might not have recognized her right away. Turnstile is still an email capture tool, but over the last few months, she's become a full-on lead generation machine. Maybe she studied abroad or something.

Jokes aside, we've made some big changes to Turnstile. Previously, Turnstile was an email gate that could only be placed before your video played. Now, we've done a full rehaul of Turnstile, with more usage options and powerful integrations, right in the SuperEmbed Builder.

Video is always the most active and engaging content, but it hasn't been linked directly to conversion. A post-roll call-to-action is close, but it's still a bit fuzzy. What's so great about the new Turnstile?

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