Summertime is play time! One of the things I’ve been playing with lately is a new video hosting service called Wistia. For a relatively low monthly cost, we can store lots of videos at a site with more privacy controls than YouTube. It also has some pretty nice features regarding user engagement and analytics.

The folks at Wistia have some really good (if somewhat goofy) videos on some production basics as well as a ton of other resources in their library. Like all good companies, you also need a space to experiment, and that’s where Wistia Labs comes in.

The above example is an example of their Presentation Sync feature from the labs. There are two components. First, it takes advantage of a service called Speaker Deck and uses their API. You upload your slides in PDF format and they convert them to an embeddable slide presentation. The other component is a video you have already uploaded to Wistia. Then Wistia’s presentation sync takes care of matching the two together. It’s pretty easy to do, and then the whole synchronized presentation can be embedded in a WordPress post (like this one). This isn’t a new idea, but their code builder makes it pretty seemless.

Two last points unrelated to the Presentation Sync – Remember to check the equipment bag to see that all of the parts are there – and no, I don’t always wear the same shirt when I do my videos.