Free Branded Video Player For Your Website

As a video company, we've lots of videos. And we mean lots. Webinars, tutorials videos, different kind of YouTube videos, product videos. Too many videos to keep track of.

But more often than not, we were a little frustrated with the video experience. You know, the experience of sharing, or in a lot of cases embedding your video somewhere. And then specifically the video player itself.

Take this blog for example. We want to give you an experience that looks and feels like Contrast. Including the video player. And we feel like we owe you that, being a video company.

So we tested a lot of video products. Of course YouTube first, because that's what almost everyone uses. But the YouTube player looks ehhhh.. like YouTube. It doesn't really blend in with our brand's colors.

Wistia then. These guys are famous for their player that you can customize and brand. The product is great. But it's kind of expensive. Surely there are better ways.

So we reverted to the standard browser player. Too ugly.

What we needed was a custom-branded video player.

What is a custom-branded video player?

You've already put so much effort into creating a high quality video, you don't want to host it in a player that doesn't help you get the most out of it – that would just be a shame.

A custom-branded video player is a tool that lets you add branding elements (colors, logos, and more) to a video player that you can then host on your website, blog, Notion, in your product, or anywhere else.

This way, your video gets the attention it deserves.

Benefits of customizing your video player

Build Customer Trust & Loyalty

Custom video players give you more control over the design so that it can better match the aesthetic and branding of your website. This will create a positive first impression and make you appear more professional and reliable.

Sell Your Brand Values More Effectively!

Brand recognition plays an important role in the buying process. Creating a consistent and coherent experience across your website and other assets will help users remember you.

Boost Customer Engagement

User-friendly interfaces with specific features, such as intuitive playback controls, quality settings, and subtitles will drive users to engage with your content. Optimized, modern players will also reduce the load times (reduce buffering and faster page load times), preventing frustration and keeping users engaged.

Effectively monetize your content

If you offer premium content, a custom video player for your website can integrate payment gateways or subscription models. The more professional look and feel will also help bring customers back and make repeat purchases. Some players can also help protect you from piracy.

Content control

Custom video players give you more control over how the content is displayed. Using YouTube can lead to ads, or recommendations to other pieces of content you might not want your user to see (like your competitors). Players can offer features like playlists, chapters, and content sequencing to help you guide viewers through a series of pieces of content and drive an increase in engagement and conversions.

Customized Thumbnails

Some custom-branded video players will let you upload an image to set as a thumbnail for your video. This is a great opportunity to add a call-to-action, inviting people to click on your video and giving them a reason to — increasing the clicks and engagement you'll get on your video.

How Contrast Can Help You?

A little light bulb went off. We cannot be the only ones with this problem. Everyone uses video. Everyone uses the standard YouTube player. It sticks out like a thorn in the eye on people's websites.

We quickly checked our customer's websites. And indeed, lots of videos. None of them blended in nicely with their website.

After doing that, we thought; oh, we can actually help them. We simply give people the ability to add a video url, choose their brand's color and then embed the video wherever they want. Easy.

So we made the free tool that this article is build around: Player.

How do I use Contrast’s embedded video player for websites

So this is the cool part. It's really, really easy to brand your player and then embed the video somewhere. You can even do it with livestreams.

Go to player.getcontrast.io. Put in your video link. Take a video that's hosted on Google Drive. AWS. Notion. Whatever. As long as it's a link of a video (mp4) and not YouTube. Because they will get angry at us.

Now at the end, you'll find that thing that looks like code. Copy it. Now it's time to place your video with branded video player where you want it.

Where can I use the branded player?

So this is how we use it. On our website. The video blends in perfectly with our brand colors. Or here, on this blog, the video you saw on top. Again, blending in nicely.

But you can also embed it in for example a Notion document. Your helpdesk. Literally anywhere where you have video and you want it to look like your brand. Use the Contrast player.

The only thing you need to do is look up how to embed it. This is different everywhere. But often very simply.

On your website, you'll likely use an iFrame. You can simply wrap it inside the <iFrame> tags. Here on our blogging platform Ghost, I can simply use /embed.

In Notion, you can type /embed as well.

BTW, you can resize the video. You can tweak the height and width inside that little code snippet you copied.

Is the video player really free?

Yes, of course. And it's free forever.

We're building a tool to help businesses host engaging webinars for their audience members. Tools like these help us get our name out there and learn how we can best build this feature directly into our product (and it's not available natively).

Lots of our clients use our platform to cut up clips from their webinars to use on social media and their website. We wanted to give customers (and everyone else) a simple way to embed those videos on their websites in a way that looks good. So we built this.

Do you want to create a webinar experience that's fully branded? Sign up to Contrast today. No credit card needed.