Integrations
DataScope & Wistia

Sharing a video online today is simple. You could shoot video clips on your phone, edit them into a short movie, and upload the finished work directly to Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, or a file-sharing tool like Dropbox in minutes. It'd be an easy way to share your video in the world, and you'd even get some validation via comments, likes, and view counts.What you wouldn't have is direct control over how your video player looks, the video's cover image, or the quality it's streamed at. You also wouldn't be able to see how much of the video your viewers watched, and the only way to lead them on to your website would be to add info to the video description and hope they visit it.Read MoreBuilding a custom player and hosting your own videos is far too challenging for most people, but the extra features a more professional video platform could offer are still tempting. That's where Wistia comes in. It's a professional video hosting tool that makes it simple to share videos your company's videos the way you want.In Wistia, it starts with projects, where you can group related videos together in one set. Just give the project a name, then set the default privacy for videos in this folder. You can copy a link to let others view your video, if you want, or can even let anyone with the link (or people you invite individually via email) add videos to the project themselves.Then, it's time to upload the videos you want—either directly from your browser, or by connecting file storage apps like Google Drive and Dropbox via Zapier (which is often the simplest way to upload videos from a mobile device). You can then drag-and-drop the videos into the order you want, tweak their individual playback, player style, captioning, and other settings. If you'd like, you can even include a contact form or link on the video, to capture email addresses before letting people view the video or to direct them to your site once the video is finished.Once you have videos, it's time to embed them on your site, share them with social networks, and see how they perform. Wistia shows the number of plays by default, then has far more detailed stats if you dig in. There's the Views page, which shows how much of the video each viewer watched, with a graph of the parts of the video that were actually watched and a heatmap of when viewers were most engaged. It'll then combine the total stats, to show you the play rate (aka how many people visited the page versus how many people started watching) and average engagement (how much of the video was actually watched. You can even see a graph overlaid on the video, to see how quickly viewers dropped off—and at what spot most people quit watching. And, if the viewers were tagged in Wistia or have a Wistia account, you can see their email address and identify who's watched which of your videos.Those tools give you everything you need to create a customized video playback experience and improve your videos over time to target what your audience wants to watch most. Wistia is a great professional alternative to hosting your videos on YouTube, one that will give viewers a better experience and help your team learn more from your audience.New to shooting video? Wistia's Library and blog feature a wide range of tutorials to help you pick equipment, set up a small studio, shoot professional footage, and edit it into videos.