Wistia is an end-to-end media hosting platform with extensive video creation, customization, and analytics tools. Upload and customize media, collaborate on a recording, or host a branded webinar, all in your Wistia account.

We made this quick start guide to walk you through the basics of your account and direct you to other helpful resources.

The first step to using Wistia is to add media to your account, which you can do by uploading a file or recording a video.

To upload media or start a recording, click "New" in the left sidebar navigation, then select "Upload" or "Record".

Each media you upload has a dedicated manage page. Here, you'll find lots of exciting features, like Edit, Customize, Embed, Share, and more.

If you'd like to make some changes to your video content—trimming, stitching clips, adding background music, etc.—click "Edit" to get started. Check out our Editing in Wistia guide for all the details.

Once you're ready to begin customizing the player to your liking, select "Customize." In the Customize panel, you can change the player color, set a thumbnail, add or remove controls, and more.

We recommend diving right in and exploring all the customization options, but if you need some guidance, check out our Customize overview for a full breakdown.

Want to make your media more accessible and easier to find? You can add captions and review transcripts for any video, and choose how they appear to viewers. Check out our Transcripts and Captions guide to get started.

Media in your Wistia account are organized into folders similar to the ones you use to organize documents on your computer. In Wistia, you can create as many folders as you need, and each one can contain one or more items.

Learn more about Wistia's media management tools here.

Now it's time to show your customized media off to the world. We offer multiple ways to share your Wistia content and expand your audience:

Check out our media sharing overview for more details.

Want to embed media on your site? No problem. We’ve designed the embedding process to be as easy as possible with two main options: inline embeds and popover embeds.

To generate an embed code for any media, click “Embed” from a video's manage page, select your embed code type, and copy the code.

For a more in-depth overview, check out our embedding overview.

Wistia Channels allow you to share video and audio files in a sleek, branded gallery with a single embed code.

To learn everything about creating, customizing, and sharing your Channel, check out our Wistia Channels help article.

Make Wistia your one-stop shop for hosting webinars. Whether you're presenting product demos, educational content, or training videos, we give you the tools to customize, share, host, and measure the impact of your webinar. Visit our Getting Started with Webinars guide to get started.

Wistia works with tools like HubSpot to help you track viewers, form submissions, webinar registrations, and engagement data in the tools you already use. See our integrations guide to get connected.

Wistia's in-depth analytics provide a complete view of who is engaging with your content and how they interact with it. You can review analytics at the media, folder, Channel, or account level. Depending on your plan type, you may also drill into identified viewer stats.

Check out our analytics collection to dive into our media engagement features.

Want to learn more about using Wistia? We recommend exploring our Help Center for lots of in-depth guides. Our blog is full of quick tips, too!

Here are some of our favorite posts: