We’re thrilled to share new features that elevate the video experience. Discover more ways to effortlessly increase viewer engagement and streamline your workflow.
This update includes something for all users, whether you keep video content private or deliver your message to the world. Explore our favorite new features below.
Share Playlists On Your SproutVideo Website
Build a polished video sequence that focuses viewer attention on your content. Introducing Playlists on SproutVideo-hosted Video Websites.
Fine-tuned customizations allow you to choose how to display your playlists and determine who can access that content.
- Create a structured learning path for customers, students, or employees. Make it easy to access content, revisit specific topics, and learn at their own pace.
- Showcase key features and benefits of your product to drive purchase decisions.
- Build a video-based knowledge center to help your customers use a product effectively. This practice reduces support requests and improves product satisfaction and retention.
- Produce serialized video content to build a loyal audience and establish topic authority with search engines.
- Inform stakeholders through organized video updates to provide reliable internal communications that ensure alignment on key initiatives, financials, and policies.
Explore limitless possibilities for organizing, securing, and sharing your video content.
Design the look and feel of your playlists to create a “binge-able” experience that keeps your audience hooked. Our favorite features include:
- Encourage playlist views with custom still or animated playlist poster frames
- Provide an uninterrupted viewing experience with auto-advance and looping, now available for Playlists on Video Websites
- Protect embedded playlists with password protection and signed embed codes
Check out the full list of new playlist features in the release notes.
Note: You can access all new playlist features and settings via the SproutVideo API.
Video Website Updates
Viewer Progress Tracking on Video Websites
Enhance the viewing experience with a visual progress indicator at the bottom of video thumbnails. It acts as a point of reference for their progress and allows them to easily resume.
With this convenient feature, your audience can see how much of the video they’ve watched at a glance. Once clicked, the video resumes from where they left off.
This is an optional setting within Site Editor.
Auto-Pause When Viewer Switches Tabs
Improve viewer engagement and information retention by automatically pausing videos if the viewer switches tabs. When the viewer switches back to the player, the video resumes.
This is an optional setting within Site Editor.
Clickable Timestamps in Video Descriptions
Clickable timestamps help viewers quickly find relevant parts of a video. Timestamps in your video description become clickable links to the corresponding point in your video on SproutVideo-hosted landing pages.
This workflow feature improves the viewer experience and increases engagement, making it especially useful for educational and long-form content.
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Choose When Poster Frames Animate
Create a seamless presentation on your video website using a mix of still and animated poster frames. Choose whether animated poster frames play:
- Always: Animated poster frames loop (up to 8-seconds) continuously
- On Hover: Animated poster frames only play when a mouse hovers over them
- Never: Animated poster frames never animate
This feature applies to video website pages with listed content (i.e., home page, search results, playlists). Animated poster frames always animate on video landing pages.
Video Player Options on Video Websites
Customize the viewer’s playback experience by choosing what video player controls to hide or display. Users that share their content with SproutVideo-hosted Landing Pages can now:
- Show a large play button or player controls before a video is played
- Hide or show the fullscreen button, volume bar, seek bar, and settings button
Control The Visibility of Login-Protected Video Listings
Pique interest and engagement by showcasing gated video content for all website visitors, even when they are logged out.
Videos secured with Viewer Login Protection are not playable until visitors successfully log in to your video website. However, now you can decide if your audience can see listings for all videos on your video website, whether or not they’re logged in.
Display Related Videos and Playlists on Landing Pages
Display your related video content to encourage engagement with other videos and playlists on your site. This new feature allows you to display a list of your related content in the footer of any video landing page and playlist overview page.
Related video recommendations are determined by the video tags you assign to your content. The more tags videos or playlists have in common, the more likely they are to show up as related content.
Video SEO Updates
Add Meta Descriptions to Video Website Pages
Meta descriptions provide readers and search engines with additional information about your website, which is helpful for video SEO. You can now add a meta description to the pages of your SproutVideo-hosted Video Website. When sharing pages from your video website, this meta description is displayed along with the Open Graph image (discussed next).
Upload Open Graph Image for Social Sharing
Enhance branding and customize your website’s presentation with Open Graph images for social sharing. When someone shares a link to your SproutVideo-hosted Video Website, this image will display in applications with rich previews (Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack, etc).
Simplified Video SEO Workflow for Embedded Content
Enjoy a new and improved video SEO workflow with Embedded Media Discovery. You can now automate video indexing for embedded content, allowing you to easily index a large number of videos. This feature takes advantage of Google’s latest guidance for video players.
With this workflow, you can signal to Google that your videos should be indexed without creating a video sitemap and adding the canonical (embedded) URL manually to every video.
When this setting is enabled, videos may be indexed by Google like any other website content: when search engines crawl the page.
Note: Use a video sitemap and Embedded Media Discovery to ensure all search engines can find your video and for redundancy. The method used for this workflow may only be supported by Google at this time. We recommend this practice to cover all search engines.
Read More: The Full List of Product Updates Q3 2024
Explore all of the new possibilities this product update provides: read the full list of updates, tour the redesigned Playlists page and Site Editor, reference our new help guides (below), and please don’t hesitate to contact our human-powered Support team.
- What is Video Metadata and How Do I Use It?
- Overview of Playlists on the Video Website
- How to Create a Video Website in 10 Easy Steps
- Product Update: Watermark Customizations, Direct Video Links, and Cloud Storage Importing
As always, we’re here to help and excited to hear your feedback. We appreciate you and your business. The full list of product updates can be found here.
