Adding an enormous play button overlay to a YouTube video

Discussions
#1

At the MicroConf Europe conference last weekend, Patrick McKenzie recommended replacing the default play button overlay on a product home page with one that is much, much bigger. He claimed to have measure a significant positive correlation between the size of the play button overlay and # of people viewing.

I’m trying to do this. I’ve made my button as an image, added it to the first frame of my video, and uploaded the video to YouTube. But I’m completely stumped at how to make the default play button overlay not show. Any ideas? Or recommendations for an alternative way to achieve this?

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#2

Not sure if you found this stackoverflow answer but could be useful

It points to a working sample

Basically, the idea is to take an image of the first frame which should be same size as the video. Then using JS and CSS, you display that image along with the Play button imaged overlayed on top of it. The Play button image will link to the video which should open at the same coordinates as the image.

#4

So I found a good solution. Switch from YouTube to Wistia for hosting product demo videos.