Customizing Your Video
Drive more interaction and better engagement with your content using Wistia video customization features.
Your audio and video content is truly powerful - and Wistia customization can ensure engagement with your audience, which drives business for you.
On this page, we’ll cover the different customization options for both audio and video and explain how to use the Customize panel. We’ll also get you up to speed on the advanced level tools for customization.
Once you customize your video, you can also choose to embed it with your customizations.
Wistia offers a lot of robust tools to make your online content your own. You can do lots of awesome stuff with Customize, including (but not limited to) changing the player color, choosing your own thumbnail, adding and removing buttons, autoplaying your video, and adding interactive elements like lead generation tools to keep your viewers engaged with your content.
The Customize panel is where all the magic lives, and should be your first stop after uploading a media. Let’s dive in!
The Customize Panel
After uploading a new media, customization gets it ready for the big time. Open the customization panel by selecting Customize from the panel on the left. The Customize panel reveals an array of different options for your media.
Appearance
The first step in making your media truly your own is to update the Appearance. The Appearance options are about getting your video looking snazzy. This drawer houses things like player color and branding. Check out our full Appearance guide.
You also have the option to limit the spectrum of player colors that you can choose from. This gives you color options that are accessible and high visibility, therefore improving the viewing experience for those with visual and/or color impairment.
You can round the corners of the player as well.
Thumbnail
The Thumbnail is the “face” of your media - it’s the first thing a viewer sees. Set the image or the brief video loop you’d like to appear before the video is played here!
The Thumbnail help page awaits you.
Controls
The Controls area allows you to tweak the player controls on your video or audio player. Here you’ll be able to control a good amount of your audience’s experience, by adding or removing any Wistia player buttons.
Check out our Controls page.
Annotation Links
Annotation Links let you show a link to your viewers without interrupting the video. Annotations appear in the upper right corner of the video for however long you’d like.
Check out the Annotations page for more.
Call to Action
A Call to Action is a clickable message that directs your viewer to what you’d like them to do next. You can place a Call to Action at any point in your video.
To learn more about the awesome powers of Calls to Action, check out the Call to Action page!
Turnstile
Turnstile is Wistia’s email collection tool. Using Turnstile, you can add a form to your video to collect email addresses and names from your viewers. You can even connect Turnstile to your email integration so that you can reach out to these interested viewers later with targeted information.
To learn more, check out the Turnstile page.
Password
The Password feature allows you to gate your video content with a password. Add a password to any video and share it with viewers you trust.
Check out the Password page for more.
Chapters
Adding chapters to your long or short-form content is super easy with Wistia’s Chapter feature. Chapters allows your audience to navigate through your content with just a few clicks. They can watch or listen to the content that’s most interesting or relevant to them!
The Chapters page has all of the details.
Captions
Captions are an important part of making your content accessible to your audience. They’re great for educators and instructors, and make it super easy for your audience to follow along in any language. The icing on the cake? They’re great for video SEO since Wistia will inject the transcripts into your on-page markup.
English captions can be ordered through Wistia at a rate of $2.50/minute for professional captions, or $0.25/minute for automated captions. You can also choose to upload your own SRT files (for free) in any languages.
If your media already has captions, the Captions customize area will allow you to edit, download, or delete the captions. You’ll also see an option to order or upload another SRT file.
Eventbrite
You can add an event signup form from Eventbrite directly to your video. What better way to help spread the word about your event than with a video?
Learn all about it on the Eventbrite Integration page.
Advanced Customize Features
There are a few powerful customization features we’ve added to make consistency and organization a little easier.
Set Project Defaults
If you upload your videos in batches, or have lots of videos in your Projects, this one is for you.
Once you have the customizations for your first video all set, select Set Project Defaults from the panel on the left.
The Set Project Defaults screen has two options:
- Apply the customization settings to all videos currently in the Project.
- Apply the customization settings to all future videos added to the Project.
These are not mutually exclusive - you may choose to use both. This means once you apply a set of customizations to a single video, you can apply them automatically to all the videos in the Project, and all the videos going forward.
Set Project Defaults will apply these customizations to the videos in your Project:
- Player color
- Player buttons and controls
- Comment permissions
Set Project Defaults will not affect any video-specific customizations you’ve made, like:
- Annotation links
- Calls to Action
- Captions
- Thumbnails
- Turnstiles
Load Settings
If your videos across Projects or Channels share common settings, this one will save you lots of time.
If you’ve just uploaded a new media, or want to add the customizations from one media onto another media, you should use Load Settings. Inside the Customize panel, select the Load Settings option at the bottom.
Load Settings includes a list of your Projects and Channels and the medias housed in them. When you select a specific media, the copy underneath will describe the customizations on the media, which if you ask me is pretty slick.
Customization FAQ
Q: Do you have an awesome animation explaining how Customize works?
A: Yes, yes we do.
Q: What if I want my medias to appear differently (i.e. have different customizations) in two different places?
A: Each version of the media in your account will only have one set of customizations. To have the same media with different customizations, you will need to create a new instance of the media.
The quickest way to do this is with the Move & Copy tool. Create a copy of your media, and start applying new customizations to it!
Q: You said customizations would show up on Twitter, but what about Facebook?
A: Unfortunately, because of the limitations of Facebook embedding, we are not able to push all of your awesome video customizations over there. Right now we can only embed a thumbnail image that links out to your video. This still has the benefit of driving traffic to your site, but if you want the full functionality of the Facebook player we recommend uploading your videos there natively.
Q: When I enable comments will that comment box show up on my website when I embed the video?
A: Nope! Just on the Wistia media page in your account.
Q: What customization features are available for my podcast episodes?
A. You can customize the player color, upload episode art, configure sharing settings, and add chapters! Check out the Customizing an Audio Episode page for more details!