Release Notes: March 2025

OK here we go! This is going to cover new features, improvements and bug fixes for the last half of 2023 and the first two months of 2025.  We are long overdue for one of these announcements so let’s get started.

Over this time period we’ve had 28 platform updates, taking us from v5.2.9 and currently sitting today at v5.2.37.

Our biggest new feature is our new course module. With this module you can now very quickly and very easily launch your online video course. But not just video! You can also add documents, anything in an iframe, and any HTML that you want as well. So maybe you use another app to create surveys? Just grab the survey embed code and you can add it right to your Spotlightr course.

We’ve also released new student record pages which is huge! These pages will showcase all student activity across the entire platform. And now students can even see their own progress within a course they are taking.

We made some big changes and improvements to quizzes and overlays, two of our most popular features.

Previously quizzes were in a separate module, so you had to create a ‘quiz’ and then add the video for it.  This meant that you needed separate embed code and watch pages for any of your videos with quizzes.  Instead we moved quiz functionality to the video level.  So now you just add a quiz to a video just like any other video.

We also completely reworked all of our overlays and consoldiated all of the templates into categories that now might a lot more sense. The whole feature is just much more intuitive now.

Here we’ll list every update during this time and I’ll take a closer look at some of the new features.

New Course Module

Spotlightr is mainly used for our secure video hosting and feature-rich video player for your courses on WordPress, Thinkific, Kajabi, Teachable and pretty much everywhere else. But we’ve heard more and more from our customers that they were looking for a very simple, easy to use course platform for their videos. Their videos are already with us so they want just one solution for their video hosting and course publishing.

Our goal was to make our course builder super quick and efficient while still looking great. Add your videos, your PDF docs, add your logo, customize the look and feel a bit, and then launch. You can publish your course completely open for access, use it for lead generation and require sign up, use access codes for exclusivity, or charge for access with our Stripe integration.

Here’s an article with an overview of the feature as well as a video demo. Here’s a quick screenshot at a demo course set up in dark mode:

And here is the lessons page when you launch a video:

Quizzes Set In Video 

Previously we had a separate module for quizzes meaning that you had to create a quiz and then select the video you want to use for the quiz, then use separate embed code and watch page from the actual video. This wasn’t very intuitive so we moved quizess to settings within each individual videos.

Now if you want to add a quiz to a video, simply select the video and add the quiz. If you want another version of the video without a quiz you can simply copy the video so you’ll have one version with a quiz and one without.

Then you can configure your questions, answers, and other quiz behaviors.

Overlays Rework

Overlays were renamed and organization was changed as well as some small UI changes here and there make our popular feature even easier and more intuitive to use.

Now we have 6 main template categories to help you find the overlay to meet your goal:

Device Limits for Galleries

Security for your videos is one of our core offereings so we can continue to expand on this. We’ve now added the ability to restrict the number of devices that can access your galleries using either access codes or via paid access through our Stripe integration.

Simply configure the number of devices you want to be able to use an indivual access code or individual login for paid galleries.

Student Progess Pages

When students are logged into their course they can access their own profile which will detail all of their viewing habits across all of videos.  We ‘ve also added a Progress tab which will detail their progress of the course, i.e. what they have watched, how much, and what’s left.

AI for Chapters and Quizzes

This new feature uses AI to from your transcriptions to generate a video summary, chapters and/or quiz questions.  Just enable when you are transcribing your video:

Here’s what’s next…

We’re working on a Google drive integration that will copy over all videos in your Gdrive. Once activated videos will get added to Spotlightr automatically once uploaded to your Gdrive as well.

There are some additional fraud protections we are also working on.  Stay tuned!