Buck Sharp

Recently, a client expressed a desire to publish video on their site. Of course, we recommended publishing to a video service such as Google Video, YouTube or JumpCut, then embedding into their site, so they wouldn't have to concern themselves with costly bandwidth or storage issues. Not to mention their video would be exposed to the massive audience those sites have already cultivated.

One hitch though. The client didn't want the public at large to be able to stumble upon these videos. Now, no sensitive data is in the videos; no trade secrets, upcoming product launches or anything of that nature. Just some legal CYA cautiousness.

We thought that would rule out any free video sharing service since sharing your video seemed a fundamental part of the arrangement. You add your video to their service, adding to the growing content and popularity of their site, while you get the benefit of embedding it wherever/however you wish.

To be sure though, we thought we'd try this scenario:

1. Upload the video to YouTube
2. Set the video as private (not ready to share)
3. Embed in a Web site

To our surprise, the video displayed in the page. Our initial thought was that once the embed called YouTube, the video was switched back to public. A quick click of the YouTube logo in the video showed that this wasn't the case.

Our second thought was that we were logged in to the relevant YouTube account so the video was only displaying because we were the account that uploaded it. We logged out, it worked. We went to multiple machines, it still worked.

What a pleasant surprise. For the price of a small logo in the corner of your video you can offload all of your video requirements to YouTube without sharing your video with the public internet if you so wish. Cool.