Tune Into Our Newest Feature: Wistia Channels

As forward-thinking marketers, chances are good that your team has a collection of videos just waiting to be seen — whether that’s customer testimonials, product announcements, content teasers, how-tos, or even a video series of your own. But, you might be struggling with getting your videos in front of the right eyes (and in one place) without sacrificing website traffic, or worse, your viewer’s experience. This has been a challenge for us here at Wistia, so we set out to create a solution that would help our customers who we know also wrestle with this.

That’s why we’re so excited to share our newest feature with you: Wistia Channels!

Available on the Advanced Plan, with just a snap of your fingers (OK, just a few steps!) Wistia Channels can help you transform a library of videos into an immersive and professional viewing experience. But the best part? Your Wistia Channel is owned entirely by you; you don’t have to upload your videos to a third-party site to display them in a cohesive way. Plus, you don’t risk losing the attention of your viewers to unwanted ads or related content served up by competitors.

When you create a Wistia Channel, you control exactly which videos your viewers see (only yours). Oh, and did we mention it’s also super easy to set up? Customize the look and feel to match your brand, and your content is ready for its big debut. So, how does it all work?

Add all your videos — with just one embed

With just one embed code, you can immediately convert a Wistia Project into a Channel to share on your website. Choose whether to embed your Channel as an Inline embed (your audience will see your entire Channel in line with the rest of your content) or as a Popover (your audience will click a single image or video to launch your Channel full screen). Plus, any updates you make to that Project will automatically be reflected in your Channel — no need to replace the embed! Phew, now that’s what we call painless.

Here’s what an Inline embed looks like:

Here’s what a Popover embed looks like:

Get a professional look, without a ton of work

We know branding is super important, and that’s why we made it easy to customize the look of your Channel. You can easily add a video header or upload a banner image, select a color theme for your thumbnails, add a project title and description, and even choose a font that aligns with your business' brand. At the end of the day, it’s the little things that add up to make a bigger impact on how your Channel looks and feels (and how your viewers perceive your brand).

Create a can’t-stop-watching experience

When you have a number of related videos that live across your website, it’s important to ensure your audience can easily discover all of them — and without interruption! Channels help you do exactly that, providing your viewers with one central place to access all of your relevant content in an organized way. To group your content, you can use Sections in your Wistia Project to add rows in your Channel that group videos by subtopics, further controlling the Channel experience. Once one video has finished playing, a countdown will indicate that the next video is about to start, encouraging viewers to keep watching more of your content.

Drive more traffic to your site

Channels are optimized for search, which means they do the heavy lifting to ensure your videos attract new audiences. This is how it works: An optimized, unique page is created for every embedded video — with Schema.org markup injected via JSON+LD and captions included on the pages. This means that your videos will rank for relevant Google searches and send new traffic to your site instead of a third party’s (like YouTube).

See Channels in action and get inspired

Here at Wistia, we’ve been using Channels to showcase our own video content, like “The Beginner’s Guide to Video Production”. But, there are unlimited ways to use Channels to group and display videos together. Here are some examples of video content you could organize into a Channel:

• Favorite or best-performing content
• Product updates
• Customer service/help videos
• Customer testimonials
• Meet the company/employee introductions
• Product reviews
• Original video series (check out our own original series, One, Ten, One Hundred)

Turn on your Channel

Sounds pretty sweet, right? Luckily, creating a Channel is simple as pie, so let’s get started!

If you’re on the Advanced Plan, simply head to your Wistia account and follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Projects and select one to get started.
2. Click “Project Actions,” and from the dropdown menu, select “View as Channel.”
3. Ta-da! Your Project videos are now a Channel!

To customize the look of your Channel to align with your brand:

1. Select “Edit” and “Banner” to add a video or upload a banner image.
2. Click “Text” to add a project title and description, and change the font to align with your website.
3. Click “Color” to change the color theme.

Ready to share your Channel?

1. Select “Share” from the menu options.
2. Select whether to share your Channel via “Embed” or “Public URL.”
3. Select your “Embed Type,” whether “Inline” or “Popover.”
4. Choose a “Responsive” or “Fixed size.”
5. Share your Channel by either copying the embed code and pasting it anywhere on your website, or sharing a public link that sends your viewers to the Channel page in your Wistia account.

Put your videos on display

With Wistia Channels, it’s never been easier to transform a group of videos into a highly engaging, immersive collection. You can now easily drive visitors of your website to one central place to access all your videos — it’s official!

If you’re on the Advanced Plan, you can get started today and create your first Channel by following the steps we outlined above. We’re super excited about this new feature and would love to see the Channels you create with your videos, so be sure to share them with us! Oh, and if you’re a Free or Pro user and want to learn more about Channels, simply click here.