Wistia is a media hosting and analytics company with tons under the surface. With Wistia, you can upload your content to the web, make it your own, and track how every viewer is engaging with it. We give you the power to understand how media is working for your business, and how to make it work even harder.

To get the most out of your Wistia experience, we made this quick start guide. We’ll walk through the basics of our key features and share links to full resources to point you in the right direction.

To get started using Wistia, you’ll first need to add media to your account. You can do so by uploading a file or recording a video.

To upload media or start a recording, head to any of your existing folders (or create a new one). Within that folder, click “Add” and then select your desired option.

After you’ve added your first media, you’ll land on the media page within Wistia. Here, you can find lots of exciting features, like Edit, Customize, Embed, Share, and more. For now, we'll focus on Edit and Customize.

If you need to make some changes to the contents of your media (think trimming, stitching clips, adding background music, etc.), click "Edit" to get started. You can refer to our Editing in Wistia article for all the details you may need.

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 just diving headfirst and exploring things, but if you need some guidance, check out our Customize overview for a full breakdown.

Media in your Wistia account are organized into folders. Think of folders like folders on your computer: you can have as many as you need, and each one can contain one or more media. Folders can be organized in any way you’d like!

You can read more about how folders work and discover other options for managing your media at Managing the Files in your Wistia Account.

It’s now time to take your customized media and show it off to the world! 🔭 When it comes to sharing your media with an audience, we’ve got many ways to help!

Take a peek at our Sharing overview for more details!

Embedding your media on your site? No problem! We’ve designed this process to be simple for you, giving you two main options for embed codes: inline embeds and popover embeds.

To generate an embed code for any media, click “Embed” from the media page, select your embed code type, and copy the code!

For an in-depth walk-through on embedding media, check out our Embedding Your Media Help page.

If you are embedding a Channel, then head on over to our Wistia Channels guide.

A Channel allows you to assemble media in a set order, to play one after the other. The best part about them? All you need is one embed code!

To learn everything about creating, customizing, and sharing your beautiful Channel, check out our Channels Help page. You’ll be a pro in no time!

If you're on an Advanced or Premium plan, Wistia can be your one-stop shop for hosting live events. Whether you're presenting product demos, educational content, or trainings, we give you the tools to customize, share, host, and measure the impact of your webinar. Visit our Creating a Live Event page to get started.

Wistia stats are the best way to get a complete view of who is engaging with your content and how they are interacting with it. You can review analytics from the media, folder, Channel, or account level. Depending on your plan type, you can also drill into identified viewer stats.

Check out the articles listed in our Analytics collection to dive into all of our stats features.

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

Here’s a list of some of our favorite posts: