I am currently working on a project for a customer who needs a video-service. Users have to pay to get access to the videos, however it should be possible to get a preview of the video (30 sec) without paying.
Now we’ve been looking into some hosting solutions and as it turns out it is not cheap when you need that much traffic on a website (and no – no-limit traffic is not an option).
So we were talking about using YouTube to host the videos, however we have no idea if this is even possible? It would have to be a private (or semi-private) video on YouTube that can then be watched from the website whenever we allow a user to watch it.
I know it is fairly easy to implement an embedded player on the website but I want to ensure that people cannot just get the video ID from the source code or from an AJAX request and then watch and share the video elsewhere.
Thanks..
You have private and unlisted videos. For private videos you can only share them with 50 people. If you’d like to share them with more than 50, then they have to be unlisted. At that point the URL needs to be known to view them. If you need more than 50 people being able to view the video, unlisted is your only choice.
Unlisted video is like a phone number. You can have it unlisted, but once anyone gets it (and is willing to share it with others) it is no longer private.
How much traffic/storage/bandwidth are you looking at using?
update:
I’ve created an unlisted video and the embedded code looks like this:
You could write your own player though that would obscure the URL.