Shopify Self Hosted Video's

If you have ever worked with Shopify you have probably tried uploading a video before, only to figure out that you can only use YouTube or Vimeo video's. Now Shopify has launched a new feature where they allow you to directly upload to their CDN (Content Delivery Network).

But why is this a thing?

Quite a lot of companies would have absolutely no problem using YouTube or Vimeo for their video's, as it is a total win-win situation. You're getting the best CDN's from the platform you want and on top of that you'll slowly grow your audience as well.

For some companies however, hosting on a platform like that, especially startups that simply don't want to put regular content out, it might be a little bit of an issue. Creating yet another account, managing the whole thing etcetera. For companies like this Shopify has launched their new video upload feature which makes sure you can use the Shopify CDN to get your video's to your customers.

What about developers?

For the developers there is a small extra thing they need to keep in mind, and that is making sure they also support HTML video players and not just the embedded video's. This should not be super hard as Shopify will load in the proper video players automatticly. Of course, you can make these videoplayers more fancy by overriding some code.

Cool things with metafields and product media

Something Shopify has launched not too long ago and is part of their Store 2.0 implementation is metafields. With the feature of uploading video's to the Shopify CDN, you can also use them more easily in metafields, of course there was also the possibility to use 3rd party videos, but I'm sure the build in option will be better.

With the new feature you can also use videos in your product media section, which will look great when you have an amazing video of your product in your media gallery.

So, will you be using the new native feature? Or will you keep using YouTube or Vimeo to grow your following?