How to secure and publish your videos on authorized domains with access control

An Access Control Profile defines where your content can or cannot be displayed.

An Access Control Profile defines authorized and restricted domains where your content can or cannot be displayed, countries from which it can or cannot be viewed, white and black lists of IP addresses and authorized and unauthorized domains in which your media can be embedded. Use the Access Control menu to view existing profiles and create new ones. You can assign this profile on a per video-level or category-level. 

Important: there are two levels of security:

1. Our basic level of security (browser side) allows you to authorize or block specific videos on domains/IP addresses or countries from the browser of the client. This security is easy to implement because no additional work is needed on your website or app. You just create a new access control profile and enable this on a video, that's it 5 minutes work. In many cases, this is sufficient enough to block content from viewing on other domains or IP addresses. However, it's also not fool-proof because videos are not blocked from the server, but on the browser of the user. 

2. If you want an additional and more sophisticated level of security, for example when publishing videos on a website behind a paywall, we recommend to use our ' Server Side Secret' (KS) security. This security blocks videos on the server instead of the browser. The downside is that you need to use our 'Dynamic embed' or our 'Video API' because your website or app needs to interact with our player in order to 'Unlock' videos for authorized users. In other words, with this server-side security the content is always blocked, unless a valid viewing session is created by your website or app for a user (for example when a user has paid for a video). 

Step 1: Create a new access control profile (or update an existing one)

1.1. Go to Settings in the top menu (the gear icon) and choose 'Add Profile' to create a new access control profile. 

1.2. Give the new profile a name and description and enter your domain name under "authorized domains". All other domains are automatically blocked. You can also use the "Block Selected Domains" option to block one or more specific domains. 

TIP: Enable the option 'secure this video with server side secret (KS) if you want to extend the security level from browser to a server-side secret (KS) - additional integration work may needed. Domain protection also works without a KS. 

1.3. SAVE THE PROFILE

Step 2: Enable the access control profile on your videos

2.1 Go to "Content' in the top menu, select the tab 'Entries' and open the video that you want to publish privately (behind a domain). After opening the video, select the tab 'Access Control'

2.2. Select your new access control profile with the restrictions that you created under step 1. In our case this is 'Authorized domain - vixyvideo.com'. 

2.3. Don't forgot to click 'SAVE THE PROFILE'

2.4. After you saved the profile on the entry, you can go to 'Share & Embed' and publish the video on your website. 

TIP: It doesn't matter which player you select in the 'preview & embed' window as the access control profile is enabled on entry-level, not on the player level.