Press Play: Now You Can Add Videos to Your Series on Medium
Plus, other new ways to help writers enhance their words
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Since we introduced Series — a new type of mobile story on Medium that can be added to over time — we’ve loved watching writers unleash their creativity. Ben Wolford chronicled his efforts to track down a child in the Dominican Republic day by day; Amber Vittoria catalogued and illustrated the moments in her life that made her realize she is an artist; Hassan S. Ali satirized what spin class is really like; and Melinda Gates outlined the badass women in science you need to know.
We want to help creators take their series to the next level. Starting today, you can upload videos to your series to tell even more vivid and immersive stories, and we’ve added Series to your profile page so you can show them off more easily.
Beyond the improvements to Series, we’ve added some new tools for writers of Medium stories, too, which we outline at the end of this post. These updates include a simple way to select a featured image for any story and support for new embeds.
Video in Series
Series are created in cards, which readers tap through one by one on their phones. Previously, Series creators were limited to text and images on each card. Starting today, creators can add a video to any card, too.
Videos are a great way to make your series more immersive: to help readers visualize an experience you’re having, showcase an event you’re describing, or make an update feel more personal. You can add videos via our iOS app, once you’ve updated to the latest version. You can view videos in Series in the iOS and Android apps. Each video is capped to 30 seconds for now, and you can learn more about our technical specs in our help center.
Series on Profile Pages
Thousands of series have been created over the last two months, but readers have only been able to discover series published by authors they follow or those hand-picked by our editors. Now, your series are listed on your profile page as well, providing an easy way for you to showcase them for readers.
All your series are featured in a carousel in the default “Profile” tab, as well as in the dedicated “Series” tab. When readers click a series on iOS or Android, they’ll be taken directly into the cover page. On web, readers will be able to send a push notification to their app.
In addition to the updates for creating series, we’ve made some improvements recently for writing stories as well.
Select a Featured Image
We’ve made it easier for authors to select the image they want to feature with their story. This featured image appears in previews of your story on Medium (on a homepage or profile) or in a tweet, Facebook post, or across the internet.
When you hit “Publish” on your story, in addition to adding tags, you’ll now be able to select an image from your story to be featured. You should see a selection of all the images you added to your story, though it’s worth noting that we’ll omit images that aren’t high resolution enough.
New Embeds: Genius, RadioPublic, JauntVR, Keynote, and more
On Medium, you can include embeds from hundreds of popular websites to enhance your stories — and we’re adding more embed providers all the time.
This year so far, we’ve added support for over 50 new embeds, including annotations and videos from Genius, podcasts from RadioPublic, virtual reality videos from JauntVR, and presentations from Apple Keynote. Just find the object you want to embed in your story (a specific annotation, podcast, video, or presentation, for example), paste the URL into the Medium editor, hit enter, and we’ll take care of the rest. As always, you can visit the full list of embeds we support.
