Patreon Video Early Access

Free from trolls and ever-changing algorithms — you can now upload videos directly to Patreon!

Patreon Video early access details

Who has early access to Patreon Video?

Patreon Video is currently only available as an early access feature. You may be eligible for early access to Patreon Video if you meet the following criteria:

• • You have published your Patreon
  • Your Patreon is in the All Audiences category
  • Your Patreon is and remains in good standing

Patreon Video is not currently available to creators who make 18+ content; however, we hope to expand eligibility to more creators in the future. All creators can continue to link or embed videos from other platforms. 

You can check your early access eligibility in your Settings.

Storage limit & pricing

Patreon video is now included at no additional cost for eligible creators through 2023

• During the early access period, we want to give creators time to try Patreon Video to see how integrated video can add value to their Patreon
• Beginning June 21, 2023, we’re giving all new eligible creators 100 hours of uploaded videos through the end of 2023 — we’ve found that 100 hours is plenty of storage, and the majority of creators currently using Patreon Video are well below 100 hours of uploaded videos
  
  • In mid-June 2023, we gave creators on our Founders plan 100 hours of uploaded videos through the end of 2023
  • Creators who enabled Patreon Video early access before June 21, 2023, were given 500 hours of uploaded videos through the end of 2023
• After 2023, we plan to introduce new pricing for Patreon Video that takes into account the cost of hosting and streaming video natively
• When we do roll out new pricing, all early access creators will have an additional 6 months to use their 500 or 100 hours, respectively. And the videos you upload during the early access period will not expire. You won’t lose access to them, and your members will still be able to stream these videos even after the end of 2023. You’ll also have the option to link or embed videos from other platforms

Content & volume guidelines

Content Guidelines

• Your video content needs to be appropriate for all ages
• Like all content, videos need to meet our Community Guidelines. To keep Patreon safe for everyone, we may need to take down videos that don’t meet guidelines or remove your early access

Volume Guidelines

• We may also review your account if we notice suspicious activity, like if there is a higher-than-typical number of hours uploaded within a month

Patreon Video features

• On-platform previews – Automatically generate previews out of your videos to convert more fans into members
• Custom thumbnails – Select a still from your video or upload a new image as a custom thumbnail
• Upload from the mobile app -Upload videos up to two minutes long directly from your phone camera or photo library
• Insights – Analytics for your posts to show you which members watch your content and what makes them engage

How to upload directly to Patreon

With Patreon Video, you can upload your videos on desktop and mobile web. Uploading on the Patreon mobile app is not yet available but is coming soon.

• 1. While logged in to your creator account, click on the Create post button from the left menu
  2. Choose the Video post type
  3. You can drag and drop your file or click the Select Video button
     
     • If you are uploading on mobile web, you can choose a video from your photo library, take a video using your device camera, or browse your device’s files
  4. While your video is processing, finish your post by adding the post title, description, tags, or file attachments – on the right-hand side, you can add your post to a collection and let us know who should have access to your video
  5. Once your video has been processed, you can customize your thumbnail by sliding through the video and selecting a still or uploading a new image
  6. If your video is at least 2 minutes, we’ll generate a 30-second video preview to attract more members. Keep reading to learn more about customizing your video preview
  7. You can preview your post before publishing by clicking the View button
  8. You can Publish now or Schedule the post to go live at a later time — you can also simply exit the post editor, and we’ll save a draft for you to get back to later

• If you have early access to Patreon Video, you can now create, upload, and share videos up to 2 minutes long, all from the Patreon app. Here’s how to share your first video from the app:

  1. Download the Patreon app
  2. Make sure you’ve switched to your creator profile
  3. Click the Create Post button
  4. Click on the Add Media button to choose an image or video from your phone camera or phone library 

Playback controls

There are several ways in which members can interact with videos to enhance their experience:

• Picture-in-picture mode – members can watch videos on full screen and view the player in picture-in-picture mode on both desktop and mobile web
• Casting videos from a mobile device – members can cast videos using iOS Airplay and Android Chromecast
• Cross-platform play state – members can start watching a video on the desktop, pause, and continue watching in-app. We’ll save your place!
• Video playback speed – Playback speeds can help your members watch videos at a faster or slower pace to suit their needs. Members using both desktop and mobile will be able to play videos as slow as 0.25x and as fast as 2x
  • On the desktop version, members can adjust the playback speed by hovering over the video and clicking on the Playback Speed icon, which will bring out a menu with different speeds to choose from
  • For the app and mobile web, they can click on the Gear icon and then select Playback Speed from the bottom sheet
• Closed captions - Closed captions are auto-generated based on the language detected in the audio of your video and will be available for all videos posted as of March 18th, 2023. We are working on enabling closed captions for videos posted from Jan 1, 2023, onwards, so you can expect to see that in the coming months.
  • On the desktop version, members can turn Closed captions on/off by hovering over the video and clicking on the Closed captions icon
  • For the app and mobile web, members can click on the Gear icon and then select Closed Captions from the bottom sheet

Note that there may be a slight delay when closed captions are available for a newly uploaded video due to processing time (it could take minutes up to an hour, depending on how long the video is)

Patreon Video previews

With video previews, you can highlight moments from your video posts to help convert more fans into members. A video preview is a short clip that plays at the beginning of your video, and encourages fans to join your membership to watch the rest of the video and unlock your posts.

Video previews are automatically enabled for newly created video posts on July 27, 2022, and after. 

Editing your video preview

• Click Edit duration for the preview editor to appear. You’ll be able to choose a consecutive clip from a minimum of 10s to a maximum of 120s (2 minutes) from your uploaded video
• New video posts will have a 30 second preview by default
• You can retroactively create a preview for an existing Patreon Video post by visiting your Published posts and clicking the Edit link for a post
• You can disable a Preview with the teaser video switch on the right-hand side of the post editor

Video preview specifications

• Your video must be at least 2 minutes in length for a preview to be created
• Video previews can be between 10 seconds and 2 minutes long
• Video previews cannot be created for posts made for everyone
• Previews will not automatically play
• Consumption of previews is limited to desktop and mobile web, native mobile is not currently supported

Resolve an issue with Patreon Video

If you encounter an issue while uploading a video, please try these troubleshooting steps to minimize processing time:

• Ensure that the output file is 1080p definition or less
• Make sure that the total file bitrate is below 8mbps
• Check that your color depth is 8-bit 4:2:0 or below

FAQ

• The videos you upload during this early access period will not expire, and there won’t be any extra costs to keep them, even after 2023. You won’t lose access to these videos, and your members will still be able to stream them.

• At this stage, Patreon Video is available to launched creators on Pro and Premium plans, whose content is intended and appropriate for audiences of all ages. Our goal is for Patreon Video to ultimately be available to all of our creators, and we are hard at work building additional infrastructure and tooling that can make that possible for 18+ creators. We will keep you updated as we work towards that goal.

  Additional information about these categories can be found here, including how to recategorize your Patreon.

  All creators can continue to link or embed videos from other platforms.

• Your account is in good standing if it has not been flagged for potentially fraudulent behavior. Additionally, your account activity must comply with Patreon's Terms and Community Guidelines.

• Patreon's Terms and Community Guidelines apply to Patreon Video. As always, Patreon is for creators who put something original out into the world and, as a creator, you may not post creations that infringe on others’ intellectual property rights. At this time we do not permit content with any nudity on Patreon Video, even if it would otherwise be acceptable under our Community Guidelines.

• We support most video formats with 1080p/2k or of smaller definition

  • There is no file size limit; however, videos cannot exceed 12 hours in length
  • Most creators will have a limit of 100 or 500 hours of uploaded video through the end of 2023. You can check how many hours of uploaded videos you have left in your settings

• It depends on a couple of factors:

  • Player size relative to video source size. For example, if the video source is 320 x 240 and the player size is 640 x 480, the player will stretch the video to fill in the dimensions. In that process, the quality of the video degrades
  • The member's internet bandwidth

• At this time, we do not provide migration support for videos. That said, we’d be interested to know if this is something you’d like to see — please let us know if this is blocking you from using Patreon Video.

• Closed captioning supports a wide range of languages, including:

  Afrikaans, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maori, Marathi, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Welsh.

• In most cases, if you were using Patreon Video as intended but are no longer eligible, nothing happens to your past video posts, and you can still post videos using a third-party platform, like Vimeo and YouTube.

  • Like all content, videos need to meet our Community Guidelines. To keep Patreon safe for everyone, we may need to take down videos that don’t meet guidelines or remove your early access
  • If we find that your Patreon should be categorized as 18+, your post(s) may be removed, and we may revoke your early access to Patreon Video
  • We may also review your account if we notice suspicious activity, like if there is a higher-than-typical number of hours uploaded within a month
  • If we find that you are seeking to abuse early access to Patreon Video or are not using the feature as it was intended, we may remove your video posts and review your account

• Beginning October 4, 2023, the Lite platform plan will no longer be available. Creators who were previously on the Lite platform plan have been transitioned to the Pro plan.

  If you were transitioned from Lite to Pro, you can host 100 hours of uploaded video directly on Patreon through the end of 2023.

• If you believe you’ve found a bug or have a general question, please reach out to Patreon Support.

  If you are in the early access program and have specific feedback on the product feature, we’d love to hear it! You can share feedback directly from your account by clicking on the Account menu button at the bottom of the left menu (the three dots) > Creator resources > Feature request > choose Patreon Video - Early Access.