Adding Videos to ServicePlanner

Once you have added Videos to the ServicePlanner Library, you can then start to report the videos as “shown” to your Contacts. They will be counted on your Report. As of version 1.2 the Videos will also be shown in the Contact Library. And if you have added the Video URLs you can stream or download the Video directly from ServicePlanner.

The Basic Steps

You can get away with the bare minimum:

  1. In the Library click on a Video category like “Ministry”
  2. Add the Title of the Video – eg: “Does God Have a Name?”
  3. Press “Done”

That is enough to get started! The video is now ready to be recorded against your Contacts and added to your Report. It will have a default cover image (courtesy of Unsplash).

Linking to the Video

There are a couple of options here:

  1. Open the official website, use the website search to find the video, open the video page. Underneath the video will be a “Share Link” button – use this to copy the link to the video, and paste that into the ServicePlanner video details.
  2. Open the official app, locate the video and open the “···” menu and click “Share Link”. Copy that link into ServicePlanner.

I recommend using the Share Link from the official app, as it means that opening the link from ServicePlanner will simply switch to the app to stream the video. Or if you have downloaded the video already in the official app, then it will just play the already downloaded video offline.

Adding Cover Artwork

This is just a matter of locating an image to add to the video settings. If the image is already saved to your Photos / Camera Roll then you can just click on the cover placeholder in the video settings, select it from the Photos on your device, and it will add it.

In terms of locating the cover artwork you have a couple of options:

  1. Open the official website in the Safari browser. Use the website search to search for the video name. In the list of search results tap+hold on the video image and hopefully it will bring up a menu where you can scroll down the list of options until you see “Save to Photos” or “Copy”. You can optionally save the image to your Photos and then add it to the video settings, or you can “Copy” and then go to the cover placeholder in ServicePlanner and “Use Clipboard Image”.
  2. Use the Google Image search. Go go Google and search for something like “site:jw.org Does God Have a Name video”. Then switch to the Images tab to limit results to images. The “site:jw.org” limits the search results to the official website. Again, use the tap+hold on an image in the search results to “Save to Photos” or “Copy” the image to the placeholder in ServicePlanner.