Highlighting the end of the year was the launch of our Polaris plan. We’ve consolidated our mult-tiered plans into just one plan that includes all features. With it, we’ve included more than enough storage and bandwidth to get small businesses, startups, and educators up and running with their video content.
If needed, more storage and bandwidth is available for purchase with storage pricing starting at 10 cents per GB and bandwidth starting at 20 cents per GB.
With the launch of that new plan, we did have a nice Cyber Monday promotion that was by and large a success. We added quite a few customers to the Spotlightr family and we are glad they took advantage of our discounted plan!
Our infrastructure moves had a few hiccups, leaving some accounts lagging behind with the migration, but we were able to make some changes to get those over.
After the beginning of the new year we have added the option to use the new player to all accounts by default as the roll-out of 4.2 continues. Users will no longer have to enable that in their Application Settings as it will show as default in their video editing page.
The amount of issues/bugs found by users will determine how long we leave the option to use the old player, but we hope to have the entire platform using the new player exclusively by the end of February.
Features Added
Improvements
Upcoming
- YouTube API timeout throttle
- Implemented Billing Alerts
- Free Signup Double Opt-in
- Implemented CDN for thumbnails, splash images etc.
- Cyber Monday Promo Release
- Bandwidth and storage add-on prorated billing
- Related videos option for On Finish Action
- 4.2 roll-out begins with toggle switch
- Implemented Improved Bandwidth Tracking
- FREE accounts affiliate badge fix
- HLS Encoding Improvements
- POLARIS account feature adjustments
- Enterprise bandwidth purchase price adjustments
- Enterprise storage purchase adjustments
- Polaris add-on subscription adjustments
- Improved migration process
- Reports on POLARIS bug fix
- Improved logo opacity handling
- HLS encoding improvement on new CDN network
- Polaris account fix in “My Site” module
- Consumption add-on changes in Enterprise accounts
- Bug fix for Reports
- Improved logo opacity handling
- Billing profile updates
- Bandwdith overage notifications & improvements
- More accounts will receive phase 1 of 4.2 roll-out
- Polaris Channels
Related Videos Option for On-Finish Action
Recently added to the On-Finish Action options is the ability to show a selection of end-card videos.
These would be shown once the main video finishes, and selecting one of the video thumbnails would play the video in the same player.
Below is an example where you see 5 videos showing at the bottom of the player after the video is complete.
Another new featuer worth mentioning here is the roll-out of our new player. All accounts now have a toggle switch that they can use to go back and forth between the old player and new player.
As time goes on more and more accounts will have that toggle turned ON for the new player for all new videos and new video edits. We enourage everyone to begin using the new player as much as possible. It’s ligher, faster, and better on mobile devices.
Once we’re comfortable we have squashed enough impactful bugs we will remove the toggle and everyone will be using the new player for all videos.
Please note that nothing is going to be done to any of your videos on web pages that already have the old code. If you want the new player on those pages you would need to swap out the old code for new code on those pages.
Here is a look at the toggle that should now be activated in everyone’s account:
The next 3 to 4 weeks will be dedicated to continuing the 4.2 roll-out and fixing any bugs and issues found by our users. We’ll also be releasing a large module to the platform called Channels.
Stay tuned!