Limit Where Your Videos Can be Discovered and Played

Sometimes you want a video to go viral, and other times, you only want it to appear on one or two websites that you control. When a video is embedded on a webpage, it is relatively easy to copy the video embed code and paste it onto another site. The video will then be able to be viewed on that website, unless you use our security features, like allowed domains or signed embed codes.

Overview of Domains

A website domain is essentially the human-readable version of the internet location of the site. Your root domain is formatted like this, *.example.com, and subdomains are formatted like this, www.example.com or blog.example.com. For more detailed information, Moz has a great explanation of how domains are structured.

Private

If you only want your videos to appear on your website, set them to ‘Private’ on SproutVideo.com. This means that they will not appear on any SproutVideo.com landing pages, and cannot be discovered or played unless they are embedded on another website. You can also use ‘Password Protected’ or ‘Login Protected’, but those security settings do not prevent your videos from being linked to on SproutVideo.com landing pages. Here are instructions for changing the privacy settings for your video.

Allowed Domains

If you want to be sure your video will only play on your website, restrict playback to your domain. This can be achieved with our allowed domains feature, where you can list the root domains and subdomains where you want your embed codes to work. By designating allowed domains, your video embed codes will no longer function on any website other than those you have selected. Embed codes can be copied from page source information, and placed on other websites, unless this feature is enabled. Here is a help article that walks you through how to use our allowed domains feature.

Signed Embed Codes

Signed embed codes are another way to restrict playback to your domain, and are extremely secure. A signature generated with a secret key is appended to your embed code, and is used to verify it. It can be set to expire, meaning a given embed code is only valid for a definite period of time. Signed embed codes require a certain amount of programming knowhow to set up, and are intended for use on sites that generate dynamic HTML content. For more details, please refer to this help article on signed embed codes.

Block Search Engine Indexing

Public content hosted in your SproutVideo account may be indexed by search engines. Search indexing does not happen immediately, but your hosted landing pages for videos or live streams with a ‘public’ privacy setting will allow access to search engine crawlers. If you do not want your content to appear in search results, you can choose to block search indexing site-wide or just for specific content landing pages..