Frequently Asked Questions

Can I invite people to privately view my video in my Wistia account?

Once your video is uploaded to your Wistia account, you can easily share it privately with an individual or a group. When you invite someone to privately view your video, an email invitation will be sent to the person with a unique link to your Wistia account. When the recipient clicks this link, they will create a password which will allow them to access the video you share with them in the future.

Once this invited viewer logs in and watches your video(s), you will receive an email alert letting you know that they have logged in and watched. You can then see their user session within your Wistia account which will show you every action they took and what parts of your video they watched.

Can I embed videos on my website and track viewing?

Yes. Wistia allows you to generate HTML embed codes for your videos that can be put in HTML documents, content management systems, or web frameworks (PHP, JAVA, RoR, etc.). Once the embed code is in place, your video will display (served by Wistia) whenever the page is loaded.

Whenever a visitor comes to that web page, Wistia will record all of the visitor's interactions with the video. This allows you to see:

• What percentage of visitors are watching your video
• Second-by-second viewing statistics for individual views as well as across all viewers
• Each viewer's IP address, company name (or ISP), and location
• Viewing activity across all videos for a particular visitor

For an interactive demo of our video tracking, click here.

Why is tracking my video important?

Tracking how your video is viewed is important because it helps you measure the return on investment for your video-based initiatives.

For example for sales, Wistia's tracking gives insight to better qualify your leads by monitoring how interested in your videos your prospects are.

In a marketing situation, tracking displays whether the visitors to your website are actually pressing the play button, which parts of the video are most engaging, and how the video is helping to increase conversions.

Do you support HD video?

The short answer is, yes.

The long answer is that HD is only a specification on number of pixels, not video quality. True HD video has 720 or more lines of resolution. Common HD resolutions include 1280x720 and 1920x1080. For resolutions this large, a very high bitrate (1500 kbps+) may be needed to provide a true HD experience. High resolutions and bitrates can lead to choppy play back of video for viewers with less capable computers.

At Wistia, we personally work with you to come up with the right video recipe for you based on your content and projected audience. Our goal is to help you provide the best viewing experience for your viewers.

Can I send a single link to an email list and invite them to view video privately?

Yes. You can create a single link to send to a group of people via email. This link can either require them to login (whitelist registration) or can allow them to view without logging in (open link).

If viewers login, the viewing statistics generated will each be associated with a unique email address. If you do not require viewers to log in, the viewing statistics will not be associated with an individual viewer.

Does your embedded video player have an API?

Yes. Wistia's embedded video player has a fully-featured JavaScript API that allows you to control and receive information from the video player programmatically. You can play a video, pause a video, and seek to a specific time in a video. In addition, JavaScript callbacks can be set up that will trigger when the video reaches the end.

Will my video load quickly for my viewers wherever they are located?

Yes. Wistia uses a content delivery network (CDN) which has points of presence all over the world. Video content will be automatically be served from the CDN node closest to the viewer which means that regardless of whether your viewers are in New York, Tokyo, or London, the video will load quickly.

Do I retain all rights to the content I upload to Wistia?

Yes. With Wistia, you retain full and complete rights to all of your content uploaded to Wistia.

What video formats does Wistia support?

Wistia supports a wide variety of video formats including MOV, MP4, M4V, AVI, WMV, ASF, MPG, VOB, MOD, and 3GP. For easiest and most consistent performance, we recommend using MOV with the H.264 codec.

For best performance, we recommend resolutions between 640 and 1280 pixels wide and video bitrates between 1,000 and 3,000 kbps.

Is my video content safe?

Yes. At Wistia, we take content security very seriously. From geographically redundant application hosting and storage to catastrophe planning and recovery we've got you covered. Brands such as Cirque du Soleil, Tribal DDB, and Nestlé trust Wistia with their video content on a daily basis.

Click here to learn more about Wistia's security.

What is a Wistia Manager?

Wistia Managers can:

• Create and manage projects
• Create new viewers and manage their permissions
• Upload video and other media content
• Invite viewers to privately view video
• View tracking statistics for private video sharing
• Publish videos to third party websites (also called "embedding a video")
• View embedded video statistics
• Receive email alerts for account activity

Do you support large video files?

Yes, of course. Upload any file up to 2 GB in size. There's no duration limit for your video files.

Can I upload video directly from a DVD?

Yes, just browse to your DVD drive and select one or more .VOB files.