WistiaFest Landscape

360Heros Talks (and shoots) 360 Video at WistiaFest

Earlier this week the 360Heros team had the opportunity to attend WistiaFest, an annual video marketing conference hosted by our friends at Wistia. Loaded with keynotes and in-depth breakout sessions, WistiaFest offers attendees a look at the latest and greatest in marketing and digital media.

360 Video Seminar

We were lucky enough to have our own Matt Sheils included in the festivities with his break out session titled “360 Video Production: The Latest Tools and Techniques“:


Matt’s talk covered our latest 360 video equipment and tips for shooting and editing 360. This includes showcasing our new modular 360 Plug-n-Play™ Holders and discussing some of our latest content.  

Leveraging 360 Video Content

Aside from covering the 360 video production process from a high level, one of the key points of Matt’s talk was leveraging 360 video as timely and engaging social content. To demonstrate that point, he filmed, stitched and finalized a 360 video during WistiaFest itself.

Photo Jun 06, 6 04 49 PM
Shooting 360 video with the Pro7 at WistiaFest.

The video was filmed during the WistiaFest sunset cruise and employs the ever-popular tinyplanet effect to create a shareable piece of content to document our team’s time at the convention. This allowed us to quickly engage our audience and offer them a unique perspective of the event in Boston.

For the marketers in attendance, this piece exemplified the value of 360 video as  a medium and the impact it has on current social platforms.

“It was great meeting you both at WistiaFest. Your presentation on 360 video was impressive! Loved the fact that you simplified what seemed to be a unachievable process.”

New 360 Video Tools

We weren’t the only ones debuting new 360 video tech at WistiaFest. Our friends from Wistia have been working in spherical video for some time now (see their original 360 video tutorial using our Pro7 rig) and have recently thrown their hats into the ring for spherical video tools. These tools come in the form of their new 360 video player (shown below), 360 video heat maps and engagement analytics.

The video above is our team’s first upload to Wistia’s 360 video hosting platform. Documenting another one of Matt’s adventures, this time in Australia, the video features plenty of educational graphics and points of interest. Using Wistia’s heat maps in our dashboard we were able to analyze where our viewers focused and interacted most frequently within the spherical footage:

Sydney Heat Map This heat map screenshot demonstrates viewers honing in on points of interest and key graphics.

With Wistia’s dashboard tools our team was able to analyze where viewers spent most of their time, which segments of the video were most engaging (encouraged the most clicking + panning) and the average rate of engagement for the piece across all viewers. Other key indicators included audience demographics and other standard video benchmarks such as views and the play rate.

Our team was thrilled to be invited to WistiaFest and to be able to celebrate new 360 video tools along side our friends from Wisita. As social platforms continue to embrace 360 video as a content category, we look forward to seeing how the space develops and continuing to create valuable tools for content creators.

Stay up to date on our upcoming news and learn about other 360 video tools via the 360Heros Newsletter.