How We Discovered the Woes of Video Hosting and Built a Better System

Here’s a little-known fact about Wistia: We didn’t start out as a video hosting company.

My co-founder Chris and I were creating a portfolio website for artists and filmmakers when we realized we needed a good video infrastructure, so we built one ourselves.

And that’s how we ended up with our fast and reliable video hosting platform.

Even though Wistia has since evolved into an end-to-end video platform, video infrastructure is still at the core of what we do. We’re constantly improving it to give you the best hosting experience possible, and it’ll always be one of our top priorities.

Building our infrastructure

When we started our business in 2006, there were no cloud encoding services, no video players in browsers, and no easy ways to handle video content at scale. So we built all of that and more to provide the core video foundation for what would eventually become Wistia.

It was like chipping away at the tip of an iceberg — we had no idea how deep it would go. Our to-do list got longer and longer until it looked like this:

• Developing and supporting a core video player
• Enabling customization of the player
• Generating and editing transcripts and captions
• Generating translations and localizing the player
• Meeting evolving video accessibility standards
• Sourcing cloud storage
• Selecting and managing Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)
• Securing video content from piracy
• Encoding and supporting all possible video formats that users want to upload
• Delivering analytics to understand video performance
• Building QoS tools to diagnose and understand deliverability issues
• Troubleshooting, support, and feature development
• Integrating all the systems we’ve built at a cost that can compete in the market

Even though we built this infrastructure out of necessity, we put just as much care into the details and user experience as we did with our main product.

We made sure the video coding was fast and reliable for all types of videos uploaded and all videos played instantly with little to no buffering. We also tracked how every single viewer watched each video second by second.

While we built this infrastructure to power our portfolio website, we soon realized that other companies looking to incorporate video into their products faced similar challenges and needed a high-quality infrastructure that provided the best video experience for their users.

We took a page out of Amazon’s playbook when they created Amazon Web Services (to give the world access to their scalable infrastructure) and built out our library of video APIs. Our goal was to make it easier for developers to integrate video without any need to understand the complexities of things like resumable uploads, video codecs and containers, or origin shielding policies for CDNs.

Why we got into video hosting

Back in 2006, sharing a video with even one person was quite the ordeal, let alone getting it out to a wider audience. This was around the time YouTube was getting started, but most filmmakers weren’t using it because the quality wasn’t good enough and they wanted more control over their content.

We launched our portfolio website to make it easy to upload videos and have them look great on the web — a rare thing at the time. We had maybe 100 people using it. While they liked it, there wasn’t enough value to keep them coming back, let alone pay for it.

So we needed a breakthrough. And, as luck would have it, we found a gap in the market.

Where the market fell short

A friend of ours was working at a medical device startup that needed to share surgical videos with sensitive information between clinical sites and their headquarters. They were actually mailing DVDs worldwide, from Chile all the way to Watertown, MA.

His company knew there had to be a better way, so he came to us and said, “You guys know a lot about video. Do you have a solution for this? I think people would pay for it.” At first, we told him to just use YouTube and make the videos private, but he insisted they needed more control and features than YouTube could offer.

It wasn’t the first time we’d heard this.

Chris had a background in film, and he had seen a similar issue in the film industry. People were FTPing (File Transfer Protocol-ing) files all over the place, but clients who didn’t know how FTP worked couldn’t open the files. That made it hard for filmmakers who needed client feedback to finish their projects.

This had come up from our portfolio website users, too. They kept asking for a private way to collaborate on their projects. That’s when it clicked for us: This was a much bigger product challenge that we could solve.

Setting a new standard for quality, reliability, and speed

We dug into the private video-sharing space and quickly realized how much work it took to encode, store, render, and deliver a video in a way that was fast, reliable, and easy for anyone to access through a link. So we rolled up our sleeves and peeled back the layers of what went into making this possible.

Global delivery

In our earliest days, we were still figuring out how to reliably help our customers deliver videos across the world without sacrificing quality. The stakes were high for them and we felt the pressure to deliver.

We powered global casting for Cirque du Soleil, who needed a way to share audition videos with casting directors everywhere. Right off the bat, it wasn’t just about delivering videos in one region — we had to build a system that worked flawlessly across the globe.

Reliable scaling for big brands

Another challenge came up as we started to bring on large-scale creative brands like Mailchimp, HubSpot, and others. With their strong brand recognition, they needed videos that could withstand large spikes in traffic. So we had to make sure our platform could meet that demand without any issues.

Video quality

We had some customers in video production studios who cared about maintaining the quality of their videos. They invested heavily in producing high-quality, visually stunning videos and knew that quality was often lost in the distribution and sharing process. So we had to get that right too.

We built our own encoding service so that we could oversee, maintain, and deliver on the quality of those videos every step of the way.

Not only that, but we also invested in unique UI components that would make the video player stand out. That way, our customers’ beautiful, high-quality videos could live inside a frame that looked just as beautiful. We built everything from upload buttons to transcript editing embeds to embeddable video galleries, all with the care and attention to detail we always wished for in other platforms.

Building a better infrastructure

Our transition to more publicly shared video content was a slow one. We started by emailing customers their own unique embed codes because we weren’t sure we wanted to scale in that way.

As more people showed interest, we saw the benefit of expanding to include embedding and sharing on websites, social media, and through email. Still, it took several years of building intentionally and growing slowly to have a system that would support that expansion.

We also developed a strong focus on the integrity of our infrastructure, which has become the core of not just videos for our customers but also our own huge library of videos.

Why you can trust Wistia with your video infrastructure

As we stumbled into building a video hosting infrastructure and uncovered more and more of the iceberg, it became clear that successfully hosting videos couldn’t be an afterthought or a side part of our business. To host at scale, we needed a solution that would always be reliable, scalable, high-quality, secure, and cutting-edge.

That’s why our infrastructure is — and will always be — a key focus for us. We’ve built a strong, reliable system that makes sure your videos are delivered with great quality, no matter the scale. And we’re always improving and upgrading it to give you the best experience possible.

Let’s talk about a few key elements that make our infrastructure special:

In-house encoding service

As a team of video creators, we know how much time and effort goes into creating, editing, and customizing videos. We also know how important it is to have a video platform that can turn all of that hard work into a great viewing experience. That’s why we have our own in-house encoding service, which means:

• We encode your videos on the fly so they’re immediately ready for customization and playback once uploaded.
• We make sure your raw video files keep their quality when converted into a shareable format.
• We simultaneously and quickly encode versions at different resolutions and bitrates so they play smoothly and at the highest quality in any network condition.
• We enhance the look and feel of your video from start to finish.
• We never serve ads to your viewers. Ever.
• You can customize your player to match your brand and choose your preferred playback settings.

Accessibility features

Accessibility is another core part of our platform because we know how important it is to make your videos accessible to everyone.

We designed our player from the ground up to be highly accessible and aligned with WCAG AA Guidelines.

We built automated transcripts and captions into our VPaaS offering and included them in our standard pricing. Wistia transcript embeds are fully keyboard navigable, so you can move between paragraphs or chapters with the tab key and play from any point by pressing space or enter.

What’s more, we’ve made it possible for your end users to edit those transcripts right inside your app. This way, you don’t have to develop your own component for editing captions and time-coded transcripts (which is much more work than it appears!).

Fast and reliable player

Of course, none of this matters if your video player is so heavy that it slows down the page or crashes when things get complicated. So from the start, we invested in building the lightest player possible that also performs well under pressure.

In fact, we just released our newest player, Aurora, which decreased the size of our main player script from 139 KB to 43 KB without sacrificing quality. That means your page and videos will load in a snap and your viewers can start enjoying your content right away.

The new Aurora player is also super easy and ergonomic for developers to work with and integrate into web applications. It was built from the ground up using web components and it reduces the time to first meaningful paint (the time it takes for the page’s main content to display on the screen) by 20%.

We also designed our CDN to support huge volumes of traffic without any interruption to your viewers, so it’s the same experience whether one person or one million people are watching. Whenever you’re ready to scale or one of your videos goes viral, we’re here to back you up.

Tackling new video hosting challenges for you

Every day, we tackle a range of challenges, from making it easy to edit auto-generated transcripts to helping you customize your video player to protecting content from piracy. These challenges excite us and keep us moving forward.

When we look back to that first medical device company, we’re reminded that even some simple problems need so much thought and intention to be solved perfectly.

The challenges may have changed, but they’re still just as important. Video hosting isn’t an afterthought to our video business — it’s the foundation of everything we do. We love picking away at the video hosting iceberg to help other businesses focus on what they do best: creating and sharing great videos.