Learn Everything about the New Video Uploads Feature on WordPress

There is always some sort of excitement around any new multimedia assisting feature being launched by WordPress. The world is very rapidly gravitating towards a content centric ecosystem where websites with original and meaningful content on them are going to not just rank higher but do more business as well.

WordPress’s inception itself was through the concept of posting content. While that was a while back and was limited to texts and images, content of all kinds and forms are now being shared and accessed all around the world. There seems to be a race among developers to introduce the next social media platform or to come up with the next video streaming website. 

WordPress & Content

WordPress rose to popularity with its ability to post blog posts in the most effective manner. It came up with analytical features which no other platforms had even thought of. Brilliant building tools coupled with top PHP development on WordPress powers millions of blogging websites in the world today. With its robust nature and ease of posting, WordPress has cemented its place as the number one choice to build a content posting or hosting website. 

Here are some of the best features of WordPress that help websites to post regularly.

• Remote Posting: You can be anywhere in the world with any device and yet you can post on your website. WordPress has mobile apps that help you post directly from your mobile devices. You no longer need a computer and a dashboard to be able to post content and the necessary information like captions, descriptions and tags. 
• Automatic Posting: You can schedule posts on your WordPress website. This is however a feature that a lot of other website building tools have adapted as well. But it was WordPress that came up with the idea of automatic posting that helped website owners to upload everything at a go and post them on scheduled date and time.
• SEO: WordPress apart from its default SEO features also has a list of plugins that help developers to post content that is relevant and has higher possibilities to get visibility. Features like keyword density, auto-correction and grammar check are either available by default on WordPress or are available through a plugin.
• APIs: Long before any other website building tool could even think of, WordPress introduced APIs that worked as widgets for third party websites. It is very convenient to post window thumbnails of content from popular websites like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok or Facebook.

WordPress wants to leverage the age of content and availability of high quality internet. Considering the rising needs of posting rich content on websites all around the world, WordPress introduced the video uploading feature that surely helps the cause for content creators. 

Video Uploads on WordPress

Like all the other features related to content creation and posting, WordPress and its founder company Automattic realized the importance of empowering websites to play rich forms of content. With that in mind, they came up with VideoPress which is a lightweight media player. VideoPress is free if your website is hosted on WordPress. It comes with monthly plans otherwise. 

What’s new to VideoPress is the ability for developers to break a piece of content into different chapters to give a preview to the viewers. This preview enables them to not only see what the video is all about but also the guide to skip to the chapter that concerns them the most. Here are some key features of VideoPress.

• High Resolution: VideoPress supports videos up to 4k resolution. It displays beautifully on screens of all sizes and shapes. There is an added support for videos of 1440p and 4k resolution.  
• Adaptive Streaming: Quality of the video playback adapts to the network bandwidth. It also adapts to the screen size of the device and users can select the quality they want to play the videos on. 
• Stream Bar: The stream bar or the progress bar, as some would know, adapts to the tone and pallet of the video. This offers a great and intuitive user experience. 
• Resume Uploads: The videos resume from where they were interrupted in the process of uploads. Failed uploads no longer have to start all over again. They resume even if there is a network error in between. 
• Content for Video: The VideoPress block allows developers to add subtitles, captions and headers of chapters as soon as the video is published. 

The standard features of VideoPress are available with the WordPress Pro plan. In case your website is on an independent host, you can ask your web development service providers to download the Jetpack as a standalone product as well. Here are some key features from the latest release of the VideoPress tool.

The new features involve something called chapters. Chapters are phases in a video that can be skipped. Viewers can look into the details of the chapters and select the part they want to skip. This is very useful when viewers resume a video they left viewing. They can simply select the part they left the video at and continue from there. 

Doing this is very simple. All developers have to do is to mention all the chapters in the description with the exact time stamp. If the description is written aptly with the time stamps, the chapters will show automatically on the progress bar. 

The beauty about VideoPress is that it is unbranded and does not come with any watermark or branding logos. The new age of WordPress development services are all about intuitive content friendly development that takes the quality of your website a step ahead than the rest of the herd. It also is ad free so your viewers can have an uninterrupted viewing experience of all your content. 

Picture-in-Picture

On selected browsers, that include most top browsers, VideoPress also supports picture-in-picture. A small floating window of the video player is put somewhere in the corner while users continue to have a look at the website and access other parts of it as well. 

Formats

At the moment, VideoPress supports a range of different formats like MP4 (.mp4, .m4v), QuickTime Movies (.mov), Windows Media Video (.wmv), Audio Video Interleave (.avi), MPEG (.mpg), Ogg (.ogv), 3GPP (.3gp) and 3GPP2 (.3g2).

All these formats are automatically converted to MP4 format by VideoPress. These videos are then encoded with H.264 video and AAC audio. 

Share

Sharing content across platforms is a common modern day phenomenon. Viewers can share the piece of content they like to their social media and instant messaging. With VideoPress as well, your viewers can share your videos to either their own website with an embedded code or copy a link and post it to wherever they want.

This adds a lot of dynamism to your website and creates a new link that is very much likely to generate a lot of backlinks to that webpage. We all know what that means. More backlinks help your website rank better in the search index. The share button is at the top right of the window of the video player. This option to share can however be disabled as well if you wish to protect the privacy of the video. 

Analytics

VideoPress offers great analytics that help you understand your viewers. The tracking can be seen in the form of stats with a dedicated screen on the dashboard. Key details include types of browsers that played the video, impressions, hours watched and total views. 

Conclusion

VideoPress makes your website look exactly like a video streaming one. It supports all the top features of YouTube like selecting the thumbnail, allowing files up to 1 GB and selecting the privacy of the video. The new age internet users are very much focused on what content is available on the websites they visit. If there is any sort of value addition from the website then viewers are more likely to interact and prolong their stay on the website. The era of static and informative websites is sadly behind us. With content rich and data heavy websites all around us, it is time to adapt to the change and create and upload rich forms of content on our websites as well.

Nandan Goda

My name is Nandan, the Owner at Gtech Web Infotech Pvt. Ltd.. I’m also a designer and developer. I’ve been working in the web development field for last 12+ years. Developing and implementing small to large-scale projects and everything in between. Currently working on a lot of CMS, dev-tooling projects. Furthermore focusing on combining Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with emerging technologies.