Are you thinking about creating an online course?

And you are caught in a prison camp of SaaS solutions for your online courses and business?

You got attracted to SaaS solutions, but soon find out that these solutions lack in providing you complete control of marketing and building a business.

You quickly find out that their landing pages and front-end sales page look similar for each course creator creating courses on their platform (Once, I thought two different bloggers were selling the same course since their topic and sales page were so similar, LOL).

You have a brilliant and "unique" course. Still, lacking payment integration with a flat sales page does not offer anything "unique" to your audience by visuals.

Forget about setting up funnels inside them. It just doesn't work.

Moreover, you do not fully own the content you hosted on them. If you stop paying the monthly SaaS platform fee, say goodbye to your course and business.

Presto Player

No, your website won't slow down; I guarantee you that. We will talk about a budget video player combined with an LMS plugin in WordPress that can deliver your courses to your audience right inside WordPress.


There is no need to go into the prison of expensive SaaS software. After this, use an LMS plugin(easy to set up) and this video player to deliver your videos. Woohoo... You are ready.


What is Presto Player


Presto Player is a WordPress plugin. Streaming platforms like YouTube allow you to play and store videos. However, they don't come with powerful marketing features.

I recommend posting your videos and tutorials on YouTube, for which you need more exposure. But not with your premium video courses.

You should always pay for a service (like Vimeo) or a plugin like Presto player(if you have a WordPress Website).

Presto player has changed how we can serve online courses to our audience. With its features, solopreneurs can offer their audience a complete branded experience, more attention, and hence more profits from their videos.
The best part is it is not as expensive as Vimeo-like service.

How to use Presto Player in WordPress?


Presto Player is easy to use inside WordPress. You can download the free version of this player from WordPress Plugins Library. Its free version offers good features like Global branding of the video player, which looks sleek and professional on the user interface.


How do I autoplay video on WordPress?

Step 1: Go to the Presto Player inside WordPress
Presto button


Step 2: Hover over the title part of Presto Player. Click Edit below it.
Presto Player Edit


Step 3: Go to video Setting and turn on Autoplay feature
Presto Player AutoPlay
Autoplay is available in free version. However, the Muted Autoplay is better option than simple Autoplay.


Pros And Cons of Presto Player

As a tool it comes with own set of advantages and disadvantages. I used this player and tried to judge it on every aspect so that it can be easier to decide for you whether it is essential for your business or not.

Pros
  • It is cost effective compared to competitors. It provides almost all the features with very less pricing as compared to Vimeo and Wistia.
  • The branding features of the player is awesome. It mixes with your theme and looks professional and clean as user interface.
  • The Chapters feature increases audience engagement with your video content. Its similar to YouTube and very structured.
  • It provides awesome integration with bunny.net. Hence at very lower cost, you can stream your courses and video content at much cheaper price with lightening speed.
Cons
  • It uses Gutenberg Block editor for adding customizing videos. Since I use a theme and page builder, it is not good to go every time to block editor and add/edit videos from there.
  • It is a new tool. Hence, there is lack of knowledge base and guidance to use this tool to full. Because of this, there are chances of bugs also.

Presto Player vs Vimeo

Feature

Presto Player

Vimeo

Pricing

$69/year for Single website 

$99 for upto 25 websites 

$240/year

(The most used plan by bloggers and course creators)

Storage and management

With Bunny.net ($0.06 per GB) with scaling or Self hosted

1TB storage per year

Ownership

Videos are in-house WordPress environment or hosted on Bunny.net

Videos are hosted on Vimeo which continues until you pay them

Video Player Features

Embed Anywhere

Customized Colors and Components

Add your logo

Global Branding player

Add Video chapters

Play Inline Videos

Third party Player support

Playback speed control

Embed Anywhere

Customized Colors and components

Customize end Screen

Add your logo

Video Trimming

Add Video Chapters

Playback speed control

Third party player support

Marketing Features

Muted Autoplay

Action Bar

Lead Capture

Call to action

Automatic integrations on customer tags

Focus Mode in Video player

LMS and Membership integrations

Sticky Player

Publish natively to Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest and Shopify

Analytics and Reporting

Google Analytics

Video Sitemap and SEO integrations

Analytics dashboard withing WordPress

Global Stats on all videos

Individual video retention statistics

Analytics Dashboard

Social Stats

Custom Reports

Engagement graphs

Presto Player Features

Presto Player Video Settings
Video Settings

Presto player Video settings contain four parts:

Muted Autoplay: Like YouTube sparks interest in a video by muted autoplay to increase watch time, you can do so inside Presto player to increase conversions.

AutoPlay: This will be a simple auto-play with audio on. I won't recommend this as it came out as a pop of sound, which is weird.

Play Inline: In mobile devices, it helps play the video where it is instead of occupying the whole screen, which is a good user experience.

Poster Image: You can set a Poster Image (Thumbnail)

Chapters

Chapters is a Pro feature. Now you can define a particular Timestamp and have a title for it.

We can define different timestamps in the video, which divide the video into sections. This helps you organize your content and increase engagement for your video content.

Just define the timestamp and label it. Users can directly jump to the particular timestamp inside the Video Player.

Chapters in Presto Player
Presto Player Global Branding
Global player branding

Branding is essential, especially when you are making online courses. Here I selected my brand color for my player inside my blog post. While making an online course, your video's color will look the same if you apply this setting inside your player.

Video Presets

Video presets are used to customize your video player experience.

You can either go ahead with the default Presets or you can click on the Add New Preset Button at the bottom to create a new preset.

This will display a list of options like Behavior, Controls, Style, Email Capture, Call to Action, Action Bar, and Dynamic Watermark. You can also, name this Preset at the top of the page.

You can edit them as per your style of video category and match your website styling as well.

You can simply choose a preset for your courses and the job is done. This will ensure all your video courses follow the same styling, logo, video controls, and behaviors.

Presto Player Video Presets

Presto Player Speed Optimizations

Bunny Stream alone
Bunny stream optimized
Presto with bunny stream

As you can see, how adding a Presto player with bunny.net improves the streaming performance. It takes 1.9 secs to load, which is 4X times fast than bunny stream alone.

The performance effects with Presto Players are pretty significant.

Although we can manually improve the performance in bunny stream in each video, the performance with Presto is still better here.

I will surely recommend this player only for performance increase. You know how a website's performance impacts Google rankings of your page and blog.

Presto Player Pricing


Presto player Pricing
Lifetime Presto Player deal

Presto player is running a discount sale. So before it runs out, quickly grab this plugin.


Conclusion


Presto player is quite good compared to other options present in the market. It is budget-friendly and it is also easy to use for a beginner who knows how to work on WordPress.

Its features help set up a whole branded experience for your customers, making you a pioneer in your market. It has all the features to increase your customers' engagement with your content, eventually making them more involved with you and your business.

Hence it is a pretty good investment for your business.


Kriti is helping beginners Solopreneurs & bloggers to setup their blogging business. From testing their business idea to implementing it step by step to build a strong foundation of their blogging business setup.

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