Keep reading for all the details on these powerful new marketing tools!

New Marketing Features Available on All Plans

We’re really excited about the new features we’ve added to all our subscription plans. Now, you can get sophisticated video marketing tools and premium integrations at a price that makes business sense.

In-Player Call-to-Action

With marketing, timing is everything. We’ve made it easier than ever to reach an interested viewer at just the right moment with our brand new call-to-action feature.

You can easily specify the duration and timing of your CTA, add text (up to 255 characters), and a URL. The clean design helps keep the emphasis on your message, without taking away from your video.

Enhanced Lead Capture Forms

We’ve supported email capture for a while, and we’ve received many requests for additional fields on our lead capture forms. Well, that day is finally here!

Our new lead capture forms enable you to get to know your viewers on a more personal level by including their first and last names in the form.

We also updated all of our existing marketing integrations to support these additional form fields. Now, if you use Zapier, HubSpot, Mailchimp, or any of the eleven available integrations, you can pass first name, last name, and email address automatically to help grow your list.

Want to see these new features in action? Get started with a free 30 day trial today.

Questions about the new features? Leave a comment below or contact our support team for personalized guidance.

The post New Features! Calls-to-Action and Better Lead Capture appeared first on SproutVideo.

We’re happy to announce the release of a new version of the SproutVideo video player. This new player will give our users greater control over the look and feel of their players. Keep reading for more details about what’s new.

New Player Updates

1. We’ve updated the look of the player to be more modern and streamlined.
2. The player color is now customizable. This allows you to match the player to your site and branding.
3. There are three options for how the video appears before the video starts. You can have a large play button over the poster frame (the default option). Or, you can display the player controls along the bottom of the poster frame so that none of the poster frame is obscured. As a third option, you can hide controls entirely, and autoplay the video.
4. We’ve added a menu to allow viewers to select different resolutions of the video for their playback. By default, the player will launch on Auto, and will adjust automatically throughout the viewing session according to the speed of the viewer’s connection.
5. You can also selectively choose to hide the settings button, the volume bar, the seek bar, the fullscreen button, or even the entire toolbar.

Here’s an example of the new player in action:

To accommodate all this new functionality, we’ve updated the Video Detail page to make configuring the player really easy for different types of embed codes:

New Player Presets

We’ve also added new embed code presets and defaults functionality. Simply customize a video embed code just the way you want it. Then, click the “Save as Preset” button to save all of the settings for future use. This way, when you need to embed another video, you can just select the preset from the “Presets” dropdown menu to load those settings.

Lastly, if you find you’re using the same preset over and over again, you can set it as your default preset. This way, all new video embed codes you generate for your videos will use this preset. You won’t even have to visit the Customizations tab.

Note: any existing embed codes will need to be updated. Embed codes already published on a website will not update automatically to use any new defaults or presets you create for your videos.

Enjoy the new video player, and let us know what you think in the comments below!

The post New Player, Player Presets and Defaults appeared first on SproutVideo.

New Javascript Player API

SproutVideo offers two APIs: the SproutVideo API, which allows you to control most aspects of your account and video settings; and a Javascript Player API, which allows you to control the behavior of the player, and track player events as well.

Popular Uses for Javascript Player API

Using the new player API, you can easily display a message at a specific point in the video, start a video at a specific point in time, create chapter markers, launch a video at a specific volume, and more.

Check out this working example of the Javascript Player API for additional inspiration.

Tell us what you think in the comments below, and please let us know how you’re using it!

The post Update: Javascript Player API appeared first on SproutVideo.

Also, we just added support for mass video management tools. Keep reading for all the details on these fabulous new features!

What is a Playlist?

A playlist is a set of videos that play in an order you specify through one video player. The list of videos included in the playlist can be displayed to the right of the player, underneath the player, or hidden from view.

Playlists are a great solution for when you want viewers to be able to access videos in a specific order. Or, if you want to share several videos on a webpage, but don’t want to use multiple video players or multiple links.

Note: for sharing videos in one location, our video websites are also a great solution, with many advantages. For instance, they support themes and custom branding, viewer logins and additional privacy settings, customizable pages, and more.

Customizing and Using Playlists

Each user can have an unlimited number of playlists, and each playlist can have an unlimited number of videos.

However, to optimize the viewer experience, we recommend limiting the number of videos included in a playlist. It’s likely better to create multiple playlists, each with a specific focus, than to place all your videos in one large playlist.

You can test out a playlist below to see how it works:

When embedding a playlist, you can customize the colors used in the player to match your branding. You can set the selected video color, the highlight color, the text colors, and the divider colors to your liking.

You have complete control over the look and feel of your playlist with our playlist embed code customizer:

Video Management Tools

The second big feature we’ve released today is mass video management. A lot of people have asked for a quicker way to edit privacy settings, add videos to playlists, tag, or delete their videos and we listened.

You can now select multiple videos from the video listing page, and add tags to those videos, add those videos to a playlist, edit their privacy settings, or delete those videos. This feature should hopefully make life easier for you, especially if you have a large video library.

We’re very happy with these new features, and we hope that you are too. Please let us know what you think in the comments below! If you have any questions, please contact us – we would be happy to help.

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Why Iframe Embed Codes?

Using an iframe to embed videos offers numerous benefits over using the <object> or <embed> tag for embedding.

We switched to iframe embed codes for a few reasons:

1. Simpler embed codes. In an effort to make things as easy as possible for you, we decided it would be best to shorten and simplify the embed codes to prevent mistakes when copying, pasting and embedded the code.
2. Better device support and detection. By using an iframe, we can better detect the type of device or browser your users are using when viewing your videos. This enables us to deliver the best possible playback experience according to their specific setup.
3. Support for HTML5 playback and skinning. Using an iframe embed allows you to customize our HTML5 video player to your heart’s content. You can make the player responsive, change the colors, hide or show controls, autoplay the video, and more. Having to insert multiple types of code in your pages, including stylesheets and javascript, could interfere with existing styles and javascript and thus break your pages. Iframe embeds are key to simplifying all of these customizations.
4. Playback analytics. Using an iframe embed code allows us to collect diverse and accurate data on playback, which we use for robust analytics and video engagement metrics.
5. Future-proofing. By containing the actual logic and embed within an iframe that we control, we’ll eventually have the ability to update and modify embeds without having you change your embed code.
6. Easy Replacing. You can easily replace a video within your SproutVideo account, and the new video will automatically appear anywhere it is embedded without you needing to swap out embed codes.

If you’d like to test out how easy it is to upload and embed a video with SproutVideo’s platform, open a free trial and test it out! If you have any questions about getting started, please let us know in the comments below, or reach out to our support team.

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