Wistia’s Town Hall Wrap-Up: November 2024

We just hosted our latest Town Hall to showcase the new features and functionality we’ve launched this year to help you get the most out of Wistia. If you missed it, no worries. We’ve got all the highlights right here!

To meet the growing demand for video, we released over 100 new updates this year — a record for us! They’re all about helping you create better videos and simplifying your workflow. Since there was no way to cover all the updates in an hour, we shared the most notable ones.

Wistia Live updates

Webinars on the Pro Plan

In case you haven’t heard, our webinar feature Wistia Live is now available on our Pro Plan! Now for just $79 a month, you can start hosting professional and engaging webinars — whether you’re a pro or just starting out.

You’d get a few more features on the Advanced Plan or Premium Plan, but the Pro Plan still has everything you need to start hosting great webinars.

Customizations and engagement features

We rolled out a bunch of features to help you engage your audience even more and customize your webinars to match your brand. Now you can:

• Switch between the Tile and Full layouts during your presentation
• Customize your event room by choosing dark or light mode, changing the logo, adding a custom button, and setting a stage background image or color
• Enable or disable the audience chat, Q&A section, and polls
• Blur your background or select a virtual background
• Bring questions and poll responses on stage
• Bring up to nine panelists on stage
• Share pre-recorded videos right from your Wistia account without juggling multiple tabs or worrying about laggy screen shares

Simulated live events

Even though playing videos during your webinar is already a breeze with Wistia, we still took it a step further.

Now you can set your webinar to automatically kick off with a video at the scheduled time — no need to be “on” from the very start. It’s perfect for saving time and setting up recurring webinars that run smoothly without all the extra work. You’ll still have chat, Q&A, and polls to keep your event interactive, and you can jump in live anytime you want.

What’s next for Wistia Live?

We’ve already made significant improvements to our analytics and integrations with marketing automation platforms (MAPs), but we’re just getting started. One area we’re particularly excited about is attendee analytics.

Think of it like the heatmaps you know and love, but for webinars! Our team is working hard to enhance how we share webinar attendance and engagement data with your MAP.

Soon, you’ll have detailed insights into how individual attendees are engaging with your content. This means your sales team can spot high-value leads based on their engagement levels and prioritize follow-ups with the most interested prospects.

With these insights at your fingertips, you can tweak your content strategy and create even more impactful webinars that resonate with your audience.

Team collaboration updates

New user roles and permissions

We launched new user roles, improved permissions, and made it possible to add multiple account owners to a single Wistia account. Plus, we introduced Team Accounts, which lets agencies, freelancers, and companies managing multiple brands organize sub-brands or teams in one account.

Team commenting

As you’re working through video edits with your team, everyone can drop comments right on the video timeline. Talk about an easy way to keep feedback fast, clear, and organized!

We’ve also added time-coded captions to let you know exactly what to tweak, and we’ve made it even easier to share review links with collaborators.

New ways to record videos

Recording by yourself with Wistia is super simple, but what about inviting others to record with you? Yep, we’ve made that easy, too!

First up, our new invite-to-record feature lets you invite anyone to record a video that gets saved straight to your Wistia account. It’s great for collecting testimonials!

And we’ve released group recording, now in beta. With this feature, you can record high-quality videos with up to nine co-presenters.

More updates in Wistia

Enhance Speech powered by Adobe Podcast

We’ve partnered with Adobe Podcast to bring you Enhance Speech, a feature that automatically cleans up your audio in just one click.

Back-end platform improvements

With all the ways we’re helping you create videos, you can bet that we’re doubling down on making sure those videos play back perfectly.

“We have made the process of getting a video from your desktop to playing back in Wistia five times faster.”

Chris Savage
CEO, Wistia

Faster uploading

First, we’ve changed how our uploading technology works. If you’re on a higher connection speed to the Internet, you will notice much faster upload rates getting videos into the platform.

New encoding engine

Second, we’ve built an entirely new encoding engine. When you see a video and it starts encoding, we will be encoding all the different versions. Now, there’s also a button you can click to speed it up.

“We’re seeing some pretty amazing numbers here. As an example, for an hour-long piece of content with our previous encoding engine, it would often take 30 to 45 minutes to encode the video.”

Chris Savage
CEO, Wistia

Instant playback

We’ve also introduced a new technology called instant playback. While we’re encoding your video, we encode versions of your video in 4k all the way down to the “very mobile-friendly with a poor connection” version of your video. While we’re encoding all of those, we have a version of the video that you can play back in real-time. This means you can start working on your video in Wistia in just a few minutes.

For the more technically inclined … 

We’ve created a new embed code and a JavaScript API to make it easier to customize your video experience.

And for those of you who work with modern development stacks, we’ve released an npm and React JS SDK to make it easier to integrate Wistia’s player.

You can even pin to specific versions of the player script to maintain stability and control during updates.

Front-end platform improvements

We’ve got a lot of good stuff happening under the hood, but sometimes a fresh coat of paint makes all the difference. We’re thrilled to share that we’re refreshing the Wistia UI to make the platform feel more seamless, intuitive, and modern.

The new Aurora video player

We’ve introduced a new player with improvements to speed and weight. Not only does it load faster, but it’s also more resilient to unwanted CSS intrusions. This means you have total control over how your videos display across different sites. Here are a few more updates:

• Rounded corners
• Color gradients in the player
• Smaller package size of the video player itself — from 139 kilobytes to 43 with no degradation in the quality of your videos whatsoever
• 100% Lighthouse Accessibility

“Aurora is 72% faster than Vulcan 2, which was the previous Wistia player in your Wistia account. When we compare ourselves to the rest of the industry, we’re now the fastest player on the market. There is no tool out there that is going to help you get a long-form video or even a short-form video from your computer to playing back this quickly.”

Chris Savage
CEO, Wistia

Caption translations

Last but not least, we’re now showing you the language that people have in their browser when they’re playing back videos. You can see what percentage of your audience can see your video in different languages.

We support multiple languages and captions, so you can go directly to captions on your video and start adding translations of your captions.

When people come and their browser default language is different, they will see captions in their language making your videos more accessible and valuable.

Chop It! competition

Like we always say, seeing is believing. To show some of our new features in action — and to show off just how much you could accomplish with Wistia as an all-in-one platform — we hosted a competition during the Town Hall.

We gave our contestants, Frank and Courtney, 20 minutes to chop and repurpose a webinar into two different marketing assets: a social media campaign and an SEO-rich blog post, respectively. See how they did it:

And the winner was … Courtney!