Video block

The video block provides the ability to add videos to your emails. When used inside the webversion, the video can be embedded inside the page (when the special 'embed' property is set to true) or a thumbnail of the video can be shown instead. For MIME messages a thumbnail is always shown, even when you set embed to true. The reason for this is that most email programs are not capable of showing video's.

All available properties of this block type are mentioned in the table below.

Video block properties

Example usage

The following input JSON shows how to display a video in a document. This is the basic usage, showing a thumbnail image in both email and webversions, that links to the video on youtube when clicked:

{
    "from" : "info@example.com",
    "subject" : "Email with a single video",
    "content" : {
        "blocks" : [ {
            "type"   : "video",
            "url"    : "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSQCH1qyIDo"
        } ]
    }
}

Embedding videos

Inside mail clients, it is unfortunately not possible to directly embed videos. On webversions however, it is possible to embed the video directly into the webpage. To do this, set the 'embed' property to true (it is false by default).

{
    "from" : "info@example.com",
    "subject" : "Email with a single video",
    "content" : {
        "blocks" : [ {
            "type"   : "video",
            "url"    : "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSQCH1qyIDo",
            "embed"  : true
        } ]
    }
}

Custom link target

By default, if no link target is specified, when the video thumbnail is clicked, the user will be redirected to original source of the video, for example the youtube.com website. If you have embedded the youtube video on your own website too, you can also link to your own website. To change the redirect URI, add a link property to the JSON. It is up to you to make sure this URI is valid, and that it indeed contains the right video.

{
    "from" : "info@example.com",
    "subject" : "Email with a single video",
    "content" : {
        "blocks" : [ {
            "type"   : "video",
            "url"    : "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSQCH1qyIDo",
            "link"   : {
                "url"        : "http://www.example.com/video",
                "title"      : "Watch the video",
            }
        } ]
    }
}

In the above example we've both included the youtube address as well as the URL of the website where the video is embedded. Both addresses are necessary, because we need to fetch a still from the video to include in the mail. We can only fetch this image snapshot if we know the full youtube address of the video.

Other platforms

All examples on this page use youtube.com examples. However, you can also use links to vimeo videos. If you need support for other video platforms too, feel free to send us an email.