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.
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
Step 2: Hover over the title part of Presto Player. Click Edit below it.
Step 3: Go to video Setting and turn on Autoplay feature
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.
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
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.
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 Speed Optimizations
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 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.
