A Recap of Wistia’s 2026 Town Hall

What challenges are video marketers struggling with right now, and how is Wistia helping solve them?

We answered that (and some more) at our fourth-ever Town Hall.

Our co-founders, Brendan Schwartz and Chris Savage, walked us through some of the features we’ve shipped over the past year — and gave us a sneak peek at what’s coming next. Folks from the product and marketing teams also jumped in to share the issues they’ve been hearing from marketers and how we’re helping solve them.

AI report takeaways

We just released a free AI Video Marketing Trends report with insights from over 500 marketers about how they’re using AI in their video work, and the results were interesting. Frank Emanuele, our Senior Social Media Manager, walked us through some of the data in a game of “three truths and a lie.”

The biggest surprise wasn’t the adoption numbers. It was the enthusiasm gap. Nearly 99% of marketers have tried AI in some form, but only about 32% say they actually feel enthusiastic about it. As Frank put it, adoption is high, but confidence is still catching up.

The other thing that surprised Frank is that ideas are the real bottleneck, not execution. About 33% of marketers say generating new concepts is their biggest challenge. AI can speed things up, but it can’t spark creativity. That’s still on us.

The main takeaway: Marketers are using AI to remove friction and repetitive work, which frees up time for creativity. That’s why we’re continuously launching AI-powered features that help folks produce and repurpose videos faster and at scale.

Video editing features

Speaking of which, we’re also building video editing features that help teams keep up with the content demand without letting quality slip.

Chris Augustine from our product team observed that perfectionism is slowing marketers down. Too many teams wait for the perfect script and setup before they even hit record. That pre-production paralysis is what actually kills content velocity. The better approach is to press record, improvise, and trust that editing is where the magic happens.

That’s exactly what we’ve been building toward. Video editing features like automatic speech enhancement and the soon-to-launch Remix are designed to take raw, unpolished footage and help you shape it into something ready to share without needing to plan every cut in advance. The goal is to make “good enough to record” the new starting point, and let the tools do the heavy lifting from there.

Video distribution features

Taylor Corrado from our brand team got into something a lot of marketers are wrestling with: The rules of video content distribution have fundamentally changed, and a lot of us are still playing by the old ones.

For years, the playbook was simple: publish a video on YouTube and let Google take care of the rest. But AI-powered search has changed the game. Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude can’t see or understand YouTube videos.

That insight directly shaped one of the things we’ve been working on. Wistia embeds are now built so that LLMs can actually read what’s inside your video, which matters a lot if you want your video content to show up in AI-powered search results.

Getting found is only half the battle. Once people are watching, you need to keep them engaged. Taylor pointed out that a lot of people watch videos without sound, so captions should be the default, not an afterthought. And if you want to reach a global audience, dubbing your videos in their language is the best way to do it. That’s why we’ve been shipping and improving accessibility features like automatic captions, AI voice dubbing, and more.

Webinar features

Jean Merlain from our product marketing team made the case that webinars are one of the highest-signal tools in a marketer’s kit — only if you’re measuring the right things.

Vanity metrics like registration or attendance rates may feel good, but they can be misleading. 500 people showed up to your webinar. Sounds like a smashing success, right? Not so fast. If none of them took the next step with your business, what did the event actually amount to? A webinar with only 30 attendees can outperform one with 500 if the right people showed up and moved forward with you.

That’s why you should track metrics tied to real business impact, like how many people adopted the feature or upgraded their plan after attending the webinar.

That thinking is what’s driving the analytics and integration work we’ve been doing. Webinar engagement data now flows directly into tools like HubSpot, so you can follow up with attendees based on how they actually engaged, not just whether they showed up.

Jean also made a strong case for treating webinars as evergreen assets rather than one-time events, which is exactly why we’re building tools that make repurposing webinars easy as pie. We’re also working on making embeddable webinars possible. Soon, you’ll be able to host the entire Wistia webinar experience — video recording, chat, Q&A, the works — right on your own site.