Ask IH: paid video platform?
If you were going to sell access to a set of video tutorials, what service or product would you use to do this?
Follow up question: What are the pros and cons to your suggested service or product?
If you were going to sell access to a set of video tutorials, what service or product would you use to do this?
Follow up question: What are the pros and cons to your suggested service or product?
I'm using YouTube, Stripe and a custom site written in Elixir. I can share more about its effectiveness after I ship it!
Should be the next few days! 🚢
Looking forward to seeing it. Let me know if you need a fresh set of eyes to test
I'm currently selling 2 courses on Store Growers.
My site is Wordpress, I'm using WooCommerce for the transactions and a membership plugin to restrict the content to paid members.
The for the actual lessons I'm using a Wordpress page with embedded Wistia videos.
They're a solid platform, re-create the video in different qualities (like YouTube does) and work well across devices.
This gets the job done. But in the most basic level.
By biggest pain point is that I want to improve the learning experience for my students: ability to track progress, comments, overall usability.
I can do this by hiring a developer (something I've been doing up to know), but they will basically re-create software that is already out there. This leads to all kinds of unique bugs or edge cases, which can be a mess to solve.
That's why I'm looking at a complete online course system like Teachable, Thinkific or Podia.
Pricing wise they aren't more expensive than a DIY solution: video hosting, plugins, development easily adds up to +$1,000 / year.
I'm steering clear of platforms like Udemy & Skillshare as you lose control over your content/students.
Aside from custom, which of the three do you think offers the most control and best price point?
To be honest haven't done my own research. Need to do a demo/trial and talk to people that are using the platform.
Pricing wise, they are all pretty similar. The difference between $39-49-79-99 doesn't really matter if you have a solid business.
Feature wise I don't know.
Teachable has been around longer so their feature set might be more developed. But my gut feel would be Podia :-)
I have not used any of these services, but I was doing similar research because I plan to release a series of tutorials/workshops down the road that I will charge for. I am a developer, so my content will be technical in some capacity. I am looking at Pluralsight and Skillshare.
Which are you leaning towards out of those two?
I would publish on Pluralsight hands down if I get accepted. That is heavily influenced by Troy Hunt, a fellow security researcher that I really enjoy following who publishes there to great success and his free Hack Yourself First course on Pluralsight. Everything that I have read about Pluralsight indicates to me that they value super high quality content and production value, which means a lot to me too.
I think I would use Udemy. If people buy through your link, they take almost no commission. You also get some traffic from udemy itself. Just an extra source of traffic for free.
Have you used Udemy for your own courses?
I haven't made one yet but I read it somewhere. You can see more info here https://support.udemy.com/hc/en-us/articles/229605008-Instructor-Revenue-Share
I'm experienced building e-learning platforms.
We built FROM SCRATCH using Laravel PHP framework three different platforms.
One was for Academy for Aesthetic Medicine and Surgery.
Another platform was for sales/marketing/growth courses.
Third platform is like Pocket TV (web + Android + iOS applications).
If you provide more details maybe some of this platforms can help you, or I can help even with advice :)
PROS: when you have custom tailored solution you can do whatever you want and you control everything.
CONS: you need to hire developers and spend much more money then on some already done e-learning platform.
How did you host/store/secure the video files?
In one platform we used Vimeo.com service and we integrated our platform with Vimeo through API.
On another platform we had WOWZA Media server with Flow Player with RTMP protocol.
Of course, you need to be logged in to watch lessons / courses. Payment we were handling through Stripe.
There is no 100% security, because someone can record screen and take course from your platform :)
Between Vimeo and Wowza which did you like most?
Vimeo - it's easier to setup and cheaper PER Year.
WOWZA is if you are asking for something specific, for example even live streams, etc.
I am actually in the process of writing software that handles this exact issue. In my specific case, it is for teaching woodworking projects. Each course has a set of videos for tools, materials, instructions, and so on. In addition, it will have written instructions, checklists, shopping lists, and more depending on the specific needs of the project/instructor.
I'm building it so the videos can be hosted privately on Youtube or Vimeo. Payments are processed through Stripe.
While that's probably not specifically the answer you were hoping for as it isn't a product recommendation. The pros: customized exactly for my needs. The cons: Web dev takes time and I still need to finish the course materials.
I heard Vimeo has a paid option. Have you done any research on using AWS CloudFront?
Other than just the basic research I haven't looked too extensively into using AWS for the videos. It wouldn't be a bad route.
For getting the mvp together I'm looking at getting it done quickly. Vimeo has quite a few features ready to go. In my case I like that videos can be restricted by domain. Of course, you pay more for these features. If the courses end up being more popular I'll spend more time optimizing delivery.
One I've seen used it called teachable I think.
Have you heard any more about people’s experiences with it
Well I bought a course that made use of it and I was pretty happy with the platform. It's all private label too so it doesn't advertise the fact they are using teachable, I even thought it was a custom solution at first. If I had a reasonable expectation of selling courses I'd use it.