The Slimlist is a lightweight, fully customizable video playlist that’s incredibly easy to use.

To try this larger click here.

The Slimlist is special in a couple of ways. For one, it’s not built in Flash — it’s built completely in JavaScript and supports HTML5 video. This means that out-of-the-box the Slimlist will automatically work in all desktop browsers and on the iPhone and iPad.

To keep things simple, slimlists are generated out of the same interface you’re already used to, Wistia projects. Each Slimlist is automatically updated as you reorganize your project. Once you embed a slimtlist you can re-order videos, add sections, or replace content that isn’t performing well. The changes will only need to be made within your account. There’s no maze of technology you need to jump through for each little change. Just set it and forget it.

To start things off, we created two high quality themes for the Slimlist.

But you can also create and host your own themes.  Because the Slimlist is not a Flash playlist you don’t need to be an ActionScript developer to customize it. You (or your web developer) can use CSS and JavaScript to make the playlist look and behave exactly how you like.

Want to learn more? You can try out the Slimlist right now!

Today, we’re elated to announce that not only will Wistia videos play on an iPad (and an iPhone and any other HTML5 compatible devices), but their playback will be tracked in the exact same way we track Flash video — viewer-by-viewer, second-by-second.

This does not mean that you’ll simply know whether or not someone is watching on an iPad, we’re capturing Video Heatmaps for each and every iPad and iPhone viewer. You’ll be able to tell who’s interested based on how much they watch, and gauge how your content is performing for your audience. Have an iPad (or iPhone) on hand and want to give our tracking a whirl? Head to our tracking demo and play with the tracking in realtime.

iPad and iPhone support is available on every plan except the Solo. If you’re an existing customer, contact us at support@wistia.com to have iPad and iPhone support enabled for your account.

New customers will notice unlimited contacts immediately. Existing customers, you’ll notice this change in your account on your next billing cycle. In the meantime, feel free to go nuts inviting people beyond your current limits—no need to worry about overages.

Why would we do this?

Because you told us to! When we originally launched Wistia, it was only for private video sharing and designed for larger businesses. At the time, charging based on the number of users made good sense. It was a fair, predictable, and simple pricing model for our customers. But as our product and business has evolved, this element of our pricing has become increasingly outdated, and you’ve let us know it.

Let us know what you think of this change (or anything else you’ve got on your mind) in the comments!

Just take a look at these 3 examples. It took me no time flat to whip up these beauties! Click here to see them in Wistia.

What can I do with this?

• Create web forms – Create a form right next to your video and let your prospects sign up for your mailing list, register for a webinar, or even buy your product.
• Co-brand your content - Doing reviews and approvals with a client? Feature your customer’s logo in the project and make them feel right at home.
• Link to other content - Link viewers back to your website or to other content within your Wistia account.

How do I use it?

1. Navigate to a project or a media in your account.
2. Click ‘Create Sidebar Element’ from the Actions menu.
3. Add a ‘Description’ element.
4. Then click the ‘Edit’ link at the bottom of your new description element.

You can toggle between advanced and simple editing modes and for those HTML nuts out there, you can even edit the source directly. The possibilities are endless.

We’re really looking forward to see how you guys use this.

Watch this 45-second video to see how it works:

There are some situations where you just want a bunch of people to watch your video without having to jump through any hoops (e.g. enter a password or register).

Now you can have Wistia generate a secure link and send it to whomever you like, however you like. Of course, all the clicks and video views are tracked. You can even disable a link to revoke access.

Thanks to all our customers who helped push us in this direction. You know who you are!

While it might seem odd for an online video provider to support formats other than video, we feel that it actually fits nicely with our offering and helps our customers get more out of their videos. We’ve learned that putting multiple content types together to provide a more complete a message can really boost interest and engagement.

Here’s the song Peaceblaster ‘68 from STS9. It’s great music to work to.

And I’ve made a fresh document embed of the Video Training Topics & Trends survey we completed last winter!

For now these features are in “beta” mode and are not active for all accounts. Give us a shout if you want us to enable audio and document embedding for your account.

And a special thanks to customers Chris Leebelt and Andy Renk for their feedback, which helped drive us in this direction!

Watch this quick screencast for an overview of how it works. Go easy on me, it’s the first screencast I’ve ever recorded.

Search tip: Forward slash (‘/’) is the keyboard shortcut for search.

Today, we’re excited to introduce the next evolution of Wistia analytics, the video heatmap. Heatmaps show you where individual viewers rewatch, skip ahead, and play through your video. It’s a very quick and easy way to differentiate the people who are interested from those who are not. It’s also a great tool for spotting which parts of a video are confusing your viewers.

In particular, video heatmaps are hugely helpful for lead qualification and prospecting. As video marketing continues to become more popular, it’s important to know more than just who registered to watch my webinar. I need to know if my prospects are engaging with my content. Heatmaps are a great way to measure engagement and assess interest on an individual basis.

To help explain heatmaps, we’ve created a quick interactive screencast. It’s best to see them in action. Let us know what you think in the comments!

Take a look at this example report I ran against Chris (yes, it’s pretty easy to spy on each other here at Wistia).

Here’s how to generate a report for one of your users:

1. Go to a contact’s page. There’s a number of ways to find a contact in Wistia; the fastest (and my personal favorite) is to use the quick search box in the upper right.
2. Click the “View all” link next to their Sessions. This will bring you to the User sessions page with a filter applied for that contact.
3. On the sidebar, click the “Show details for these sessions” link and you’ll be presented with the full, expanded audit trail for that contact.

When you print this page, a special formatting will be applied to it so it looks like a nice, clean report and not like you just printed a web page.

If you have the capability to print to a PDF, you’re all set to create beautifully formatted, print-ready reports of your users.

We’ve heard requests for printable user reports from a few of you guys, but I want to give a special thanks to Jay from ShopWorks for the brainstorming session and iterative feedback.

– Brendan

If you’re a Wistia power user, chances are you do a good bit of contact management. And if you’re doing contact management, you most certainly use (or should be using!) contact groups to organize your account. Our Zebra release included a slew of new features that made contact and group management a whole lot easier, but there were a few things we missed.

Our survey uncovered that the workflow to remove a single contact from a group is rather painful: you have to go to the group, page through all the contacts, find the one you’re looking for, and then remove them. That’s a bummer.

We just released an update that allows you to remove a contact from a group right from their contact page. Say I’m in your account and you want to remove me from the “sales team” group because I can’t close a deal to save my life. Just go to my contact page and click the red “x” next to the sales team group. That was easy.

A special thanks to Murat from Pacific Trading for pointing this out and helping us work through the solution!