Archive for the ‘Product Updates’ Category

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The New Wistia WordPress Plugin!

Tuesday, May 15th, 2012

WordPress is a great blogging platform. It’s easy to make posts and revisions, or to customize your theme. There’s a smorgasbord of plugins at your fingertips. To that smorgasbord, we have now added our own Wistia plugin!

WordPress can be a volatile place for web video. Javascript, Flash, and HTML5 elements — these are all things that historically have trouble making it from the post editor to the user’s screen. External scripts get stripped, inline scripts get mangled, HTML tags and attributes get removed. And this is all happening at multiple levels: in the editor itself and when the page is displayed.

Of course, there are some good reasons for this behavior, and I think it’s important to understand that many of these limitations are intentional. For example, external scripts and Flash are blocked by default to prevent common hacks like cross-site-scripting (XSS) attacks. IFrames can’t be transparent because, theoretically, a malicious iFrame could take over the entire page. Javascript is often mangled so that it can be validated as XHTML, but the WordPress parser is imperfect. And TinyMCE, the editor used by WordPress, has its own set of filtering rules!

In the past, our solution at Wistia was to provide an oEmbed link and a WordPress plugin to enable it. This worked well enough for a while, but it’s ultimately an imperfect solution. Our feeling at Wistia is that, if you need to use a plugin, then why shouldn’t any Wistia embed code work flawlessly?

To get the Wistia WordPress Plugin, go into the Plugins section of the WordPress admin panel, click “Add New,” and search for “Wistia.” You should get a result for “Wistia WordPress oEmbed Plugin” or “Wistia WordPress Plugin” — we’re trying to get the name changed. Click Install Automatically, activate it, and you’re done! Now any embed code generated from Wistia’s SuperEmbed Builder should work flawlessly in your WordPress posts. Paste it when you’re in HTML mode, then feel free to switch editing modes. The embed code might change slightly, but it should still work just fine!

Posted in Product Updates | 2 Comments »

New mobile video optimization for iOS

Friday, April 20th, 2012

One of the most important things to us is to make sure that all of our customers’ videos can be played anywhere without any hassle. Like seriously. It’s more important to us than feeding our families, or even ourselves. We’d totally fast for three days in solidarity if something went wrong (but please don’t actually hold us to that). Our videos have always been able to play on iOS – we use a separate HTML5 encode and switch seamlessly based on what you’re using to view a particular video.

However, there have been some little lingering problems with iOS that we wanted to solve. Native video implementation on iOS differs on the iPad and iPhone. One of the most noticeable issues with mobile video for developers is that if you have a dropdown menu element on the same page as a video element, and the dropdown menu opens over the video, then the user can’t click the dropdown menu. The video loading process on iOS isn’t optimal: it starts with a black screen, then moves to a still image, then a play button. Since our customers put often put in the effort to customize the Wistia player, we want them to be differentiated from the default on mobile devices as well as desktops. We want our play button with the color our customer chose, with proper feedback when they click on it.

With Wistia videos on iOS, when you pause the video, the still shows the last thing you played, not the default still that other video players default to. The player has the native controllers, then, when you get to the end of the video, it returns to the main play screen. In addition, iOS is extremely buggy about loading the initial still for a video — it will work for a while, then when you use the iPad more, it just shows black. Our change fixes that scenario. Usually, when a video is over, a user has to click “done” to go back to the page, but with our Call to Action plugin, you’re forced out of fullscreen so you can see the call to action immediately. All of this means that the player plays well with other elements on the page in addition to staying intuitive for users. 

In addition, we simplified the mobile implementation of our Turnstile email gating tool; now, when you click the play button after entering your email, the video just goes, instead of having to click an additional play button.

But that’s enough talk; if you’re viewing this post on a mobile device, give it a whirl!

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New features activated across accounts

Monday, April 16th, 2012

There’ve been a few features over time that we initially built for individual people and thought it would only be applicable for them. Since we like to keep our product streamlined, simple and easy to use, we don’t just toss any feature we build into the product by default — for overly specific features, we keep it to people who ask for it. However, with certain features, we’ve learned that there’s wide enough to demand to make them available across accounts.

Sometimes more options can add confusion, but the power of these tools outweighs the problems — not to mention we know you guys are smart enough to survive Wistia with the training wheels off! Here are the features that we’ve newly activated in all accounts. As always, let us know if you have any questions!

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Engagement graphs get a facelift

Monday, April 2nd, 2012

You might remember our old engagement graphs from the ancient days of Stats 1.0. They were great, but they could be confusing — people wondered why sometimes, areas of the graph exceeded 100%. It all made sense once we explained, but with Stats 2.0, we figured we’d remove the extra step in understanding and make these graphs more intuitive (as well as more informative).

This new engagement graph separates watches from rewatches (the former graphs were basically the top line of this graph). The first view by an individual of any part of the video is counted in the blue portion of the graph, while any subsequent views are counted in the orange (so take note: 16 views worth of orange could be one person watching 16 times, four people watching four times, or 16 individual rewatches — you can come to further conclusions in the individual heatmaps).

With the new engagement graphs, you can tell more than ever which parts of your videos are the most engaging, whether it’s because they’re the most interesting and most confusing, and continue to improve the videos you make in the future based on this information. Happy analyzing!

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Turnstile: Easy pre-roll email collection

Tuesday, March 27th, 2012

Gated videos should be no stranger to you if you’ve been following Wistia for a while. We’ve been using them for our content offer videos like Video Marketing 101, but we are mean and selfish so we wanted to keep all the fun for ourselves. Okay, no, actually it was just a lot of work — so when people would ask us how to do it, that was basically our answer. However, now that all of our hard work on getting Stats 2.0 out the door has come to a close, we’re finally launching Turnstile, our pre-roll email collector!

Turnstile is especially useful with our recent identity tagging feature that’s part of the recent update to Wistia’s analytics. Admittedly, it may not be quite as fun to look at the stats when you don’t have any identities tagged. Using Turnstile, you can tag the identities of more of your prospects, so you don’t just get new contact information — you also have a way to tie all of their activities together to figure out whose information might be most valuable.

Learn more about Turnstile or play with a live demo of the SuperEmbed Builder to see how it works!

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