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 included at no additional cost for eligible creators

• 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 — 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
  • Creators who enabled Patreon Video early access before June 21, 2023, were given 500 hours of uploaded videos
• In the future, we may 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 can still stream these videos. 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 10 minutes on iOS and up to 2 minutes on Android 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
• Async video updates – You can navigate away from the publishing flow while waiting for a video to process. Simply fill in the post details and publish your video post. The video will process in the background and publish automatically once finished. You’ll be notified when your post is live. If there are any issues with processing or uploading, we’ll notify you about why it failed so you can make the necessary changes

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. (Optional) You can schedule your video as a drop, allowing fans to experience the content together with real-time chats. To enable this feature, make sure the Make this a drop toggle is turned on. Learn more about scheduling Drops
  5. Add the post title, description, tags, file attachments, and/or add your post to a collection
  6. If your video is still uploading/ processing, you can continue to the next steps and fill in the rest of the fields. You will see the expected processing time noted in the bottom right corner of the page
     
     • We will notify you when an upload has failed and the reason why it failed so you can make the necessary changes for another attempt
     • Once the video has been processed, you can customize your thumbnail by sliding through the video and selecting a still or uploading a new image
  7. Click Next to set your Publish options, like letting us know who should have access to the post (required).
  8. 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
  9. You can preview your post before publishing by clicking the View button
  10. 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
      • You can publish your video while it's still processing and navigate away from the post editor. The video will continue processing in the background and be automatically published once it's finished. For scheduled posts, the video will be published on the scheduled date as it normally would
        
        • You’ll be notified when your post is live. If there are any issues with processing or uploading, we’ll notify you about why it failed so you can make the necessary changes

• If you have early access to Patreon Video, you can now create, upload, and share videos for up to 10 minutes on iOS and up to 2 minutes on Android, 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:

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

We are currently testing an updated preview experience called Video Clips with a small group of creators. Learn more about Clips testing here.

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 there are any issues with processing or uploading, we’ll notify you about why it failed so you can make the necessary changes. 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
• Ensure the file uses the H.264 video CODEC
• Make sure that the total file bitrate is below 8mbps
• Check that your color depth is 8-bit 4:2:0 or below

For a more detailed guide on optimizing video uploads for Patreon, check out our comprehensive article on How to limit processing time for your videos.

FAQ

• The videos you upload during this early access period will not expire, and there won’t be any extra costs to keep them. 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. 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.

• 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.