Product Spotlight: See What's New in Wistia [November 2024]

The holiday season might mean slowing down for some, but not for us at Wistia. We’ve been busy bundling up a sleigh-load of product updates to make your video workflow — and your season — as stress-free as possible.

Ready to unwrap the updates? Let’s start with the biggest one…

Aurora: The dawn of a new video player

We overhauled our video player to bring it into the future. Meet Aurora, our smallest player yet. At just 43 KB, Aurora is a third the size of its predecessor and its load times are 72% faster, making it the fastest player on the market!

We didn’t sacrifice one ounce of quality while building this nimble player. You get all of the same powers you expect from the Wistia player but at a fraction of the size. This means your site or app will load faster, which helps your page rank better in search engines and keeps your audience engaged.

Plus, here’s some good news for developers: We’ve revamped our JavaScript API to make writing and reading custom behavior for your player easier than ever. We also updated our React wrapper to load faster and avoid content shifts by default.

The player will automatically be available in your account as it rolls out. We’ve got more player updates coming soon, so stay tuned!

New features that empower your team from start to finish

Group recording (beta)

Whether you’ve found your ideal group of customers for a product panel or top thought leaders for an industry discussion, Wistia makes it easy to record them all in one place.

With our new group recording feature, you can simultaneously record up to nine people — and one screen — locally in HD for the highest quality.

Plus, you can adjust your A/V settings and change layouts throughout the recording session. Once you’re finished, all the participants' recordings are automatically uploaded to Wistia, where you can easily edit, share, and repurpose them.

Team Accounts

If you’re an agency juggling client accounts or a big business with different departments managing their own videos, you know how tricky it can be to keep everything in order.

That’s where Team Accounts comes in. This new feature lets you manage billing and payments in one place while tracking and billing back usage to all the accounts that roll up to you. Plus, each account runs independently, so teams can work without waiting for approvals from one source.

Channel permissions

We’ve just made it possible to set permissions at a Channel level. Now your team or contractors can work across a series without any hold-ups to get access. Plus, you can control who watches your Channels. Just lock a Channel to restrict access or unlock it to share widely.

To access these permissions, select the “Share” button on the Channel page.

Updates that take your webinars to the next level

Auto-starting webinars

Got a recurring series that you want to run exactly as planned, running a webinar in another time zone, or just don’t want to get out of bed?

Let this new feature come to the rescue! Now you can have your live event start on its own at a scheduled time with a pre-recorded video from your content library. You’ll still have chat, Q&A, and polls to keep your event interactive, and you can jump in live anytime you want.

Redirecting your audience post-event

We heard you all loud and clear: You wanted a smoother way to direct your audience to a survey or link right after your webinar. No more hunting for links in chat or waiting for emails — just a clear, effortless flow. Well, now you’ve got it!

Just add a post-event redirect URL while customizing your webinar, and we’ll automatically send your audience there right after the event ends.

Feature enhancements

In between building the Aurora player and making other big updates, we took the time to fine-tune some of our favorite features:

• Easier role auditing: We’ve made performing an audit of who has access to your account much easier. Now you can export the role and last active date of all your users to a CSV file.
• A search bar on your user list: Looking for a certain user in your account or want to see who has a Manager role? Head over to the new search bar on your user list! You can filter down the users by name or email and sort by role.
• More team commenting features: Now you can copy a link directly to a comment or leave longer replies with our new smart comment textbox.
• New form submissions metric: If you’re generating leads with our lead capture form, now you can see a “form submissions” metric in the analytics instead of a standard “conversion rate.” This way, you get to track what you actually want to measure.

That’s all for November!

We’ve got you covered on all things video, so you can focus on tackling your gift shopping list.