I use the service Wistia.com to embed videos on my blog pages: I have covered the company before here and mentioned their analytics and video player. Today the company announced another series of improvements to their player on their blog here that are worth considering. The new features go way beyond what most video hosting sites offer.
Included are several enhancements for showing a call-to-action slide that will come at the end of your video stream (the controls to set this up are shown below), new social sharing buttons that will appear at the bottom of the video frame, along with a place to add your logo too. As if this isn’t enough, there is also the ability to add an interactive transcript that scrolls along with the video. Some of these can be found in competitive players, but none in a package for the equivalent cost of Wistia’s hosting service.
The nice thing about Wistia’s transcripts is they contain essential Google SEO juice. You can click on a particular word and be magically transported to that portion of the video. Wistia has a two-step process: they convert the text automatically, and then spend another day passing the text through human readers to ensure accuracy.
The new features are all part of your account at no extra charge, with the exception of the transcriptions that will cost $5 per minute of your video. Plans begin at $23 a month for hosting up to three videos, and jump to $79 a month for unlimited videos. And, as the company says, “They will work on your desktop, they will work across browsers, they will work on all mobile devices, with no extra work on your end.” That is great news indeed.
