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Update: April 12, 2016

We have now released this as a full feature to  all Unbounce customers. 

Check out the full release post here





One of the hottest design trends on the web right now is the use of video backgrounds , which should come as no surprise since bandwidth speeds are getting faster and web-browsers are becoming more robust. In fact, one of the most active threads in our own Community last year was:



How can I create a YouTube Video Background? … which involved a fancy little javascript workaround that one of our developers put together (big shout out to Johnny!). While the script ended up working pretty well, it seemed to only fuel the demand from customers for us to actually build this into the page builder as a native feature.



I’m happy to announce that thanks to our most recent Shipit Day, our wonderful developer Mark was able to build this as a real, built-in feature that’s ready for beta today. Hooray!



Video backgrounds have been implemented fairly successfully on websites so far, but there is some debate on whether or not they would have a positive or negative effect on a landing page. While the effect might look beautiful, it could prove to be too distracting and might contribute to lower conversion rates.


Like anything else you implement on your page, you’re going to want to test this thoroughly to see what effect (if any) it has on your conversion rates. We recommend running an A/B test and segmenting a small portion of traffic towards the page - just to be safe.


How can I join the beta?

Sound off in the comments below and let us know you want to try it out! If you don’t have an Unbounce account, you can sign up for one here. 


  



Curious to hear your thoughts! We’ll get this turned on shortly. 


Hey Chris! This will be enabled globally, so you can include video backgrounds on  any  _templates – even your own!


We’ll get this enabled shortly… but in the meantime, let’s try to find a time machine. 


Sounds good!


Sure, Muhammad! 


Can’t wait to hear your feedback, Seth. 


Thanks Alex! We’ll get you signed up extra fast since you included an awesome .GIF. 



We’re running our A/B tests now. Would love to hear how yours go, Matthew!


Can’t wait to see your A/B test results, Joey!


Fantastic! Can’t wait to hear your feedback, Sabastian. :) 


We’ll get you added!


Will do, Dan!


Sure thing, Kevin!


Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes!


Yes to everyone above ^^^.


Update: 2016-02-17
We have now added support for Wistia and Vimeo in addition to YouTube. A big thanks goes out to all the stellar marketers who provided feedback so far.


So stoked let me know when it’s ready to go!


I want in 🙂


In fact, I NEED this now! 


Would love to be in on the beta. 


Great! I am so glad to see this information.  


Please, include us in this. Thank you!


Hello Justin. First off, just want to say a big “thank you” for including me in the beta and also for providing such awesome software to help build landing pages. 


I wanted to mention that I built a new LP this morning using the new video background and noticed that my page load speed increased dramatically. 


GTMetrix showed 9.8 seconds load time. Yikes! (I used a simple 2 minute video from youtube) (it also slowed down my entire computer, chrome was running at like 25% CPU)


When I revert back to a simple image background for the same LP, the load time drops dramatically down to 1.9 second load time. 


Just wanted to throw this out there. Maybe I am doing something wrong? Maybe the secret to keeping load times low is to use 15 second videos that loop? 


I welcome any feedback as to how to use the video feature properly. 

Thanks again 😉


Hey Justin, this looks awesome! I would love to be a part of the beta and give it a try! Many thanks!!!


@Justin Veenema - any chance you could add this to our account as well? We’d realy realy like it and have some great videos ready…


To my surprise this morning, my video backgrounds feature was enabled. *Happiness* - I have some questions, does everyone have the same issue where you have a brief loading screen before the video plays on loop? If so, how can I have it looping without the loading bit after every loop?


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