April Product Update—Channels Edition: Email Collectors, Light Mode, and More!

Back in February, we launched one of our most exciting features to date — Wistia Channels. This new feature allows users to turn a group of videos into a professional and immersive gallery experience, right on their website. The response to Wistia Channels has been super exciting so far, and since launch, we’ve added a few new enhancements we think you’re all going to love. Keep reading to learn more about these must-have features you may have missed!

Add an email collector to your videos

As marketers, we know that being able to generate leads from your videos can be super important. Now, you can gate your videos and send qualified leads directly to your email lists and CRM on your very own Wistia Channel! Easily add Channel Subscriber functionality to your content with just a few clicks.

With this feature, you can collect email addresses right from within your Channel, and on our Pro and Advanced Plans, you can automatically schedule an email to notify them when new content is ready. Plus, we integrate with your favorite CRM so you can take full advantage of this valuable data.

Unlike YouTube subscribers and Facebook likes, your subscriber data is owned by you. Simply add a “Subscribe for updates” button to your Channel and customize the Subscribe form by asking for a First and Last Name or just an email address. Easily sync your Subscribers with your marketing automation platform of choice to take full advantage of user-tracking and lead qualification tools, and boom — you’re ready to go!

Turn on Light Mode for a different look

Select Light or Dark Mode for your Wistia Channel depending on the look and feel of your brand (and the content you have displayed). The battle between the light and dark sides of the force has never been so fierce.

Simply go to Edit > Color > Background when you’re viewing a project as a Channel to modify this setting. It’s as easy as flipping a switch!

Set a custom font for your Channel

You can now change the font on your Channel to align more closely with your business' brand! Check out our developer documentation to learn how to set up a custom font.

We’ve also added an updated font-picker to make it easier to decide what font you’d like to use on your Channel. Just like magic, the font name in the dropdown menu is now rendered in that particular font. Easy picking!

Show your viewers what’s Up Next

Channels transform a Wistia project into a Netflix-like experience your viewers will know and love, but the best part? When you create a Channel, you control exactly what content your viewers see — without ads or suggested content getting in the way. And that’s one of the reasons why we added the “Up Next” functionality to Channels; we wanted to make it easy for viewers to sit back and watch more of your content without any interruptions.

Once one video in your Channel has almost finished playing, we’ll automatically show a preview of the next video on the bottom right-hand corner of your Channel along with a 10-second countdown. Your viewers can then either click on the preview to immediately begin playing the next video, or they can wait until the countdown ends and the next video will automatically start playing on its own.

Reap the SEO benefits of Wistia Channels

Channels are not only a beautiful way to organize and display your video content, but they’re also an excellent tool to use for getting your brand discovered. Created with SEO in mind, Wistia Channels optimizes your videos for search by creating a unique page for each embedded video in a Channel with Schema.org structured data injected via JSON+LD with captions included on the page.

What does all of that mean? Well, to put it simply, it means that Channels can actually help you send more traffic to your website rather than to sites like YouTube. If you’re interested in learning more about the differences between Wistia Channels and YouTube Channels, be sure to check out this post and get in the know!

That’s all for now, but be sure to stay tuned for more Channels updates throughout the year. If you’re not currently on the Advanced Plan and want to see a demo of Channels in action or want to chat with someone on the team, just give us a holler by clicking the link below.