Most of the time you’ll be using your video marketing to reach as many people as possible to drive awareness, engagement, conversion, and retention. But then there are those times when you’ll produce video content that is sensitive and designed for specific internal audiences like customers, partners, and others. The goal here is to make sure your confidential videos don’t make it into the wrong hands.
There are many different types of internal content to consider and each sensitive in their own ways. For example if your company live streams an all-hands town hall meeting and sensitive information is shared, but not all employees were able to watch the live stream. In an effort to get the video into the hands of all employees your HR team wants to use the recording in a companywide email. Before the email goes out with the sensitive videos the HR team needs to figure out how to protect it.
Another example is recorded internal video trainings that the sales organization shares throughout the sales and support teams. On demand video for video training is super effective, but what if this content makes it outside your company? Or worse, in the hands of your competitor?
This post goes into a couple different methods for distributing protected video content on the web, we’ll start simple with tips for free tools like YouTube and work our way into more advanced security features offered by premium video hosting platforms.
Using YouTube Unlisted and Private Video Features
If your business relies solely on YouTube to host and manage videos then you can leverage YouTube’s “unlisted” or “private” setting to hide the video from the YouTube search. Anyone that does not have the URL of the unlisted video will be unable to access it. Another handy tool in YouTube is the ability to privately share a specific video with up to 50 people via email addresses. These people will receive an email invite and are required to have their own Google or YouTube account in order to view the content. This is not a recommended method but one to note if you are stuck in a situation that requires you hide valuable content. If YouTube is your main platform it’s still good for:
- sharing harmless educational content — non subscription
- getting feedback on an entertaining top-funnel video from a subset of initial customers you trust, or
- working at a non-profit seeking an inexpensive option for internal-only content
Video Marketing Platform Security Options
Video marketing platforms typically come with a set of security tools and modules to protect videos for internal communications scenarios and use cases. Depending on your company’s size, industry and level technology sophistication security needs may range and therefore not all video marketing platform solutions will solve secure video needs. Here are 5 common video security features found in most video marketing platforms:
1. Password Protected Video
Password protected video features are found with almost all video hosting and marketing platforms. This is a simple feature and gating option that only permits authorized individual or groups of viewers to view a single video or playlist of content.
2. Domain Restriction
Domain restriction allows for the control of where the video can be embedded, shared, or played back. This is perfect for keeping videos that should stay on your website, on your website and only viewable there.
3. Scheduled Delivery
Some video marketing platforms provide the ability to upload and time release videos at specific dates and times. These features allow you to schedule when you want a video to become available and when the embed code will expire.
4. IP Address Restriction
IP restriction is one of the best ways to restrict access to your videos based on physical geographical location such as a college or company campus. Since most IP addresses are restricted to specific networks you can make sure the only people that are seeing your videos are watching them onsite at your location. This is a great method for ensuring your internal training videos aren’t being leaked outside your work campus.
5. Single Sign-On
Single Sign-On (SSO) is an authentication method that allows for the connection of two different user management/security systems to speak to each together and allow the same users to access different environments and applications from a single set of credentials. SSO is the perfect method for creating an internal video content hub for training content, internal communications, and executive briefs. With SSO, employees can simply login to the secure video portal using their pre-existing credentials.
6. Encrypted Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMPE)
More advanced video hosting and marketing platforms will offer RTMPE. RTMPE is a method that breaks your video content up into pieces to be delivered and only playback if a specific piece is required. RTMPE is a pretty advanced option but does provide a lot of protection since it’s nearly impossible to rip the full video making it difficult to steal or private video content.
