Frequently Asked Questions

Have technical questions? Check our full documentation.

What is Wistia?

Wistia is a web video hosting provider for businesses. We help our customers manage, share, and track their web video, which allows them to concentrate on what they do best (making their amazing product/service) rather than spending time with the headaches of video hosting.

Who is Wistia?

Wistia is a small group of guys (and gals) that are obsessed with online video and the benefits it can bring to any business.

You might be asking yourself, "who loves web video?", but the truth is any small business should! Video is the communication device that allows you to scale your message in an engaging way, and the interweb has made it possible for even small companies to level the playing field against their larger competitors. We've dedicated ourselves to becoming experts in this crazy world of web video, and now we're here to help our customers be successful in it. From the ins-and-outs of container formats, to optimal length of your webinar, we're just a phone call or email away. We also love ping-pong, strong coffee, and craft beers.

Learn more about the individuals that make up the company on our Team Page.

Who uses Wistia?

We have customers in almost any area of business you can think of. Their roles range from marketing, to sales, video production, training, hiring and beyond. Some are really large, some are tiny tiny. Some broadcast their message to the World on their public page, some share their video with an exclusive few using Wistia's account backend. No matter their size, it is our pleasure to help grow their business using the power of video.

Why is Wistia so in love with analytics?

To most effectively answer this question, it's best to start with a short story: years ago, there was only one metric - "views". Ben's custom boot-making company, "Ben's Boots" had a homepage video that was accumulating lots of views, but no one was purchasing. Ben thought to himself "my video must be great, because I've got loads of views. My product is great too. Why oh why is no one buying?". Ben was blind to the fact that his video was way too long and confusing. All he saw was the views.

Then one day, a friend recommended Ben check out Wistia. Wistia made it easy for Ben to host his video and embed it on his website. Even more, Wistia told him that many folks watched his boot description section time and again, then stopped watching. Ben re-edited that section, and suddenly the views continued to the end - and Ben's customers bought! Ben was very happy. The end.

We all know video is the best way to get your message across. Tracking how your video is viewed helps you measure the return on investment for your video-based initiatives. Almost any business situation can benefit from effective tracking. 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. Analytics are the key to translating your video investment into business achievements.

Why wouldn't I use YouTube? It's free, right?

In some contexts, YouTube is the right place for your video. YouTube is the world's second largest search engine, and for the user, it's completely free! The question is whether you want to 'market a video' or 'market your business with video'. In the first case, you want to maximize the number of views. In the second instance, your goal is to get interested users in your product to experience your brand and take action (like make a purchase). Wistia focuses on customers that want to market their business using video.

While YouTube provides their services free to the user, they make money by showing ads. This means if searchers come upon your video on YouTube, it will be surrounded by ads. If they find your video on your website, clicking through it brings them to YouTube - where they can show them more ads. In some contexts, this is not a problem. But for many businesses, being related to the products YouTube is advertising muddles their brand experience.

We've published a number of blog posts to help customers decide if YouTube or Wistia is right for them. Check them out:

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

Once your video is uploaded to a Project in your Wistia account, you can easily share the Project 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. The viewer is given permissions defined by you: by default they can view, but they could also be given sharing, download, and upload access to this Project.

When 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 video on my iPhone and iPad?

Yes! Every single Wistia embed code is designed to support both Flash (which is what most desktop and laptop browsers use) and HTML5 (which is what iOS devices use). With Wistia, there's no effort involved in setting up a video on your site that supports HTML5 (iPhones and iPads). No transcoding multiple versions on your end, no embedding multiple versions of the video. Just one embed code, no hassles.

Do you support HD video?

Wistia does indeed support HD video. But HD video is a tricky animal. HD video requires high resolution and high bitrate video files, which means huge file sizes. The balancing act we help our customers deal with is how to stream a high-quality video while still allowing Joe from Sales to watch it on his "less capable" home computer (he refuses to get a new one, despite the fact that the floppy disk drive hasn't worked since 1993). Other video hosting providers have either forced customers to view videos in HD, which means poor Joe is out in the cold, or given viewers the 'option' of upgrading to HD. As if your viewers didn't have enough trouble just clicking 'play'. We were also unhappy with the idea of showing HD encodes at smaller sizes - it was inefficient and we couldn't perceive a real quality difference.

So Wistia went a different route. If the video you upload is of HD quality (meaning 1280px wide or more) we will create an HD encode for you automatically upon upload. At standard embed sizes (ie. 640px wide) the standard definition version appears. However, when your viewers watch the video at full screen (where the difference is highly noticeable) the HD version appears. This provides the HD experience in a useful way, without bogging the average user down with a video that buffers constantly.

Does your embedded video player have an API?

Yes. Wistia's embedded video player has a 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.

Check out the documentation on our video player API in our documentation.

I've got viewers across the globe. Will my video still load quickly for them?

Absolutely! Wistia uses a content delivery network (CDN) which has points of presence (which we nerds call nodes) all over the world. Instead of being served from one central place, content will be automatically be served from the CDN node closest to the viewer. 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?

Your amazing videos are yours, we just want to help you share them with the world. 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 MP4 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?

You know it! Upload any file up to 2 GB in size. There's no duration limit for your video files.

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