September Product Update: Chaptering Goes into Beta and More

If you’re a Wistia customer, you’re likely familiar with the monthly product updates that appear on the login screen. We make these videos to keep you informed of the smaller changes that we’re working on in between our larger product launches.

Starting this month, we’re bringing those updates to the blog, to make it easy for our entire audience to stay up-to-date on the ways our product changes each month. Here is what we’ve been up to recently:

Smooth operator

After the launch of our new player, Vulcan, we ran into an issue with Chrome that affected the playbar color. We implemented a quick fix, but weren’t entirely happy with the end result.

This month, we updated the playbar so it rolls out smoothly across the player instead of in stops and starts.

Best resolution

360 videos are already impressive, but combined with the clarity of 4K, they are true show-stoppers. Now when your viewer’s network connection can handle it, Wistia will automatically serve 360 videos in 4K.

Eye spy

Your logo hangs in the corner of every page in Wistia to make your account look polished and professional. We gave the logos a retina update to make them extra crisp.

Facebook fix

We want your viewers to have the fully customized experience you created and for you to be able to see the stats from each video you share. Facebook restrictions have limited our ability to collect stats from or display customizations on Wistia videos posted there. To address this we made an update to the way that videos are shared to Facebook. Now, viewers will see a thumbnail image in Facebook that directs to the media page within Wistia.

Making moves

We launched Vulcan, our brand new video player, in June. We are beginning to migrate all accounts to the new player, so every viewer can experience Wistia videos with the best playback and better resolution. We’re making the switch on the back end, so you don’t need to do anything but enjoy watching your videos in a sleek new player.

Chaptering chatter

An early version of our chaptering plugin is in beta!

With the beta feature enabled, you can add chapters to your videos in the Customize panel. You’ll see chapters indicated by the dots along the playbar, and the list of chapters will appear when you click on the new icon along the playbar. If you’re the owner of your account, you can head to Account>Settings>Beta Features for access to get started!

We’ll be back next month with another update. Have a great September!