Reinvented Video for WordPress
The next generation VideoPress is here — powerful, simple video hosting for your blog or website.
Today, we’re announcing a complete overhaul of VideoPress, the service that has powered more than 3,000,000,000 video plays on WordPress.com and Jetpack-connected self-hosted WordPress sites around the world. We’ve made the next-generation VideoPress dynamic, responsive, and lightning fast to support the ever-evolving needs of content creators everywhere.
Take a peek at what’s under the hood!
Embed anywhere, play anywhere
Out of the box, the new VideoPress is lightweight and responsive for beautiful playback on any screen, from smartphones to desktops. VideoPress works on all modern browsers and devices, and gives blog and site authors the power to engage their audiences no matter where they are.
Not only do videos look amazing on WordPress sites, but you can also embed your videos anywhere on the web — other websites, social media, chat services — by using a permalink or a snippet of code.
Major speed enhancements
VideoPress now takes a fraction of the space it used to and is optimized for speed, so pages and posts with video content load faster. This is a huge plus for viewers who use slower connections or rely on bandwidth-strapped mobile devices.
It’s your content
At Automattic, we believe wholeheartedly that you own your content — video or otherwise.
The new VideoPress puts your content front and center. The player is ad-free and unbranded to ensure your videos look and feel like an integral part of your website or blog, not like they belong to a third-party video platform. Unlike other video hosting services, VideoPress starts and ends on your video, keeping traffic on your site and giving you full control over the content to which your visitors are exposed.
New features, new look
A real-time “seek” feature lets you skim through any video and helps you start playing at the desired point in the video. Here’s a sneak peek that our developer community will particularly enjoy: the player’s skin and behavior is controlled entirely by JavaScript, HTML and CSS, opening up a malleable slate for customizations by themers in the future.
Everything you love, and more
VideoPress embraces the features that users have come to love, like privacy settings and rich stats, but also includes additional enhancements. Every video now features its own permalink, and the sharing pane has been redesigned to offer different options for embedding, like starting playback at specific times, looping, and autoplay.
OpenSource ❤︎
The rebuild of VideoPress revolves around a robust API for embedding videos easily in WordPress.com and Jetpack-enabled self-hosted websites. Though the API is private at the moment, many components of the new VideoPress libraries have been open sourced, including jpeg-stream, pixel-stack, and video-thumb-grid.
Get the goods
Once a standalone upgrade, VideoPress is now available exclusively in paid WordPress.com Plans to streamline updates, payments, and security enhancements.
To enable all the goodness of video support on your site, upgrade your WordPress.com Plan to Premium or Business. Then, upload and share videos as you please. If you already have a Premium or Business plan, sit back and enjoy. VideoPress will automatically handle the nuts and bolts to deliver an amazing viewing experience for your fans, followers, and friends!
Correction: an earlier version of this post insinuated that the new VideoPress is accessible for Jetpack users who upgrade to WordPress.com Premium or Business. Though videos can certainly be embedded anywhere, the option for Jetpack users to upload videos directly to VideoPress via a WordPress.com Premium or Business plan is scheduled for a future Jetpack release.
- July 1, 2015
- New Features, Video, VideoPress
WordPress.com News 
Would there be a Videopress (of some sort) for non-business/premium bloggers? In the future, this would be great for me. I like Youtube, but I don’t feel safe to make videos there.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Great question! As for now, we’re keeping VideoPress part of the paid Plans as it was before to enable us to keep VideoPress user-focused and ad-free. Should we make any changes, you’ll see it here first!
LikeLiked by 7 people
Thanks. I was thinking of signing up for a paid plan, when or if, I become popular enough! I would love to add some videos to the mix.
LikeLiked by 5 people
At last! I think it is to improve the quality of the still image that shows each video when it is not running.
LikeLiked by 3 people
It looks like VideoPress is not an oEmbed provider in the self hosted version of WordPress. Any plans to change that?
LikeLiked by 4 people
Currently working on adding this!
LikeLiked by 6 people
This is great, I can’t wait to play around with this new feature.
LikeLiked by 7 people
Great
LikeLiked by 2 people
[When] this comes to us that are using JetPack and self-hosted, two questions:
1) Will the playback be HLS compliant on mobile devices?
2) Can we limit serving/playback to specific Domains/URLs? (ex: I upload video to VideoPress, embed it behind my paid membership forum, ONLY people logged into my membership forum will be able to play the video even if they attempt to share/embed it elsewhere)
Looking forward to using the new release soon!!
————————-
@JeremyCee
http://about.me/JeremyCee
LikeLiked by 3 people
I’d love to post videos on my blog but I think it will slow down my page load time. Will it?
LikeLiked by 2 people
The videos load asynchronously, so it won’t!
LikeLiked by 4 people
Can’t wait to post a video now! Looks like I need to get busy making one! 🙂
LikeLiked by 4 people