Providing Video Courses As Well As Forum Discussion To Members

[Zed Shah]

Hi I am looking into XenForo for a forum I am going to launch

I will be launching the forum as a paid members one and will also be selling separate video courses to those same members from within that one forum

I have two questions if I may:

1. Is XenForo a good option to give access to video courses which have multiple modules within them? i.e. is this a good way of distributing that content

2. Providing I get a techie to do his part is it too much of a pain to segment the different areas of one forum depending on what level that member has paid for?

Many thanks in advance

 

[Yanni]

I think (new) memebers are allowed to help each other so here I go, when you talk about video's you're talking of a big use of memory. Personally I would add the video's to youtube (for example with a tutorial series makes part 1 visible to everyone, other parts should then only be seen by those who have the link). This way you keep more free space and you can get money for the views as well. The only issue would be members giving the links to friends unless you don't think of it as a problem.

The second question was a bit unclear to me, but from what I know of xenforo it's perfectly possible to make certain forums private or to assign them to only a certain group. A level 1 members can only see a level 1 forum, level 2 sees level 1 and 2 I suppose and so on! Th epoint is, yes you can do this.

 

[Zed Shah]

I think (new) memebers are allowed to help each other so here I go, when you talk about video's you're talking of a big use of memory. Personally I would add the video's to youtube (for example with a tutorial series makes part 1 visible to everyone, other parts should then only be seen by those who have the link). This way you keep more free space and you can get money for the views as well. The only issue would be members giving the links to friends unless you don't think of it as a problem.

The second question was a bit unclear to me, but from what I know of xenforo it's perfectly possible to make certain forums private or to assign them to only a certain group. A level 1 members can only see a level 1 forum, level 2 sees level 1 and 2 I suppose and so on! Th epoint is, yes you can do this.

Thank you for the reply Yanni, yes the videos will be hosted on Wistia so will not be taking any bandwidth from XenForo ...hopefully the Wistia embed code works on XenForo? ...shall have to look into that

Great that I can assign certain levels to parts of the forum which is what I need as I am selling a portfolio of training products asides from the forum discussion center, but I need members to have just the one login and just restrict what they see and dont see depending on what level of membership they have

 

[EQnoble]

Thank you for the reply Yanni, yes the videos will be hosted on Wistia so will not be taking any bandwidth from XenForo ...hopefully the Wistia embed code works on XenForo? ...shall have to look into that

Great that I can assign certain levels to parts of the forum which is what I need as I am selling a portfolio of training products asides from the forum discussion center, but I need members to have just the one login and just restrict what they see and dont see depending on what level of membership they have

I made a basic wistia bbcode on request of a memeber here when I first heard about them (I think it was a couple of years ago), since then they have added much more to/refined their API which makes much more possible but even with a minimalist approach to it you can make a bbcode for it out of their embed code though I don't know how well that works for non public videos.

In general embed code wont work directly (on almost all forum software) since users generally don't have permission to use html in their posts directly but as I said you can create a custom bbcode or bbcode mediasite which can be powered with simple html rippped from their embed code on done with more sophistication and offering more options by making use of php callbacks and thee wistia API. I do believe they endorse a full php class (not sure if it is staff or client created though) to make that job easier as well.

 

[Yanni]

Thank you for the reply Yanni, yes the videos will be hosted on Wistia so will not be taking any bandwidth from XenForo ...hopefully the Wistia embed code works on XenForo? ...shall have to look into that

Great that I can assign certain levels to parts of the forum which is what I need as I am selling a portfolio of training products asides from the forum discussion center, but I need members to have just the one login and just restrict what they see and dont see depending on what level of membership they have

Wistia seems expensive lol

Anyhow, I'm sure I've seen add-ons that can make you redirect your users too.
I hope you're looking for something like this: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/thread-redirect.4134/
If not there's still a lot of info on how to do small coding to get that intended redirect.

 

[EQnoble]

Wistia seems expensive lol

Wistia has a free plan but in my opinion the reason they are primarily a paid service is it is intended to be used for business/commercial reasons rather than random videos of people pranking people or twerkin or whatever leaving the gems hidden in the mass of the rough. Video encoding and delivery is expensive and youtube makes it's money off content creators one way and wistia does it another way.

I don't speak for them but I would venture a guess that wistia is not intended for the amateur who casually uploads a video for anyone to see and is more geared towards people that need delivery of video assets to their customers for their business.

However all that aside, wistia also allows you to lock playback of the videos to your own domain which is pretty much needed for what the OP described (because he is selling access to his videos and with youtube only one person needs to pay him to get the video url and then can share it defeating the whole purpose of having pay-to-play video content) and with a sound business model, good content and a target market segment that understands the value of the content you are offering it is not hard to write off the monthly cost (which is substantially less than encoding and delivering video from your own hardware).