Top 7 Secure Video Hosting Platforms [Updated 2023]

Secure Video

Use modern hosting technology to secure video content and achieve data privacy compliance.

Video is an increasingly important communication tool for businesses in every industry. Organizations of every size are using video to reach out to customers, Livestream important events, demo their products, and more.

But video isn’t just an external communication tool. It’s also great for internal communications. Employee training, executive messaging, and even financial reports all translate well to video – but there’s a catch.

Videos that contain sensitive data or copyrighted information need to be secured. Secured hosting ensures only authorized users can access your content.

Understanding Secure Video Hosting

Internal videos (and many others) contain private, sensitive data. Nobody wants to invite strangers onto a live earnings call. If your videos involve sensitive partner or customer data, you need to make sure that data is secured.

This is where most free video hosting sites fall short. Yes, they often offer “private” or “unlisted” privacy options, but that’s simply not enough. Finding that content is all too easy, and cybercriminals are using highly sophisticated tools to look for it.

Even if you’re fortunate enough not to be targeted by cybercrime, data privacy regulations like GDPR or the CCPA require content publishers to do more. Achieving compliance with these regulations ensures you and your viewers enjoy best-in-class security.

In the video hosting industry, security also means protecting content creators’ intellectual property rights. That means users should not be able to download and share videos unless the video host specifically allows them to.

Why Secure Video Hosting is Important

There is good reason to comply with data privacy regulations even if your particular industry isn’t a regulated one. These rules are designed to protect content creators and users from threats – like identity theft, data breaches, and cybercrime – that are just as dangerous regardless of where you live.

Cybercriminals prize video content because it rarely comes alone. Compromised video often includes metadata and other useful bits of information that hackers can then use to dig deeper into their victims’ lives and businesses. Screen sharing videos contain useful hints about the way your business is structured and the software you use.

Video content creators who don’t secure their data put themselves and their users at risk. The average cost of a data breach is $3.9 million. The more video content you create, the more important secure video hosting becomes.

7 Best Secure Video Hosting Platforms

There are several features that secure video hosting sites have in common. For the purpose of this list, we’re focusing on platforms that allow users to password-protect videos and set access restriction policies. This is the minimum that a video host must offer to its users in order to qualify.

1.   Cincopa

Cincopa is a fully-featured, analytics-ready secure video hosting site designed for marketers, educators, and enterprises. It allows content creators to create NetFlix-style content galleries and to control who accesses content based on assigned user roles.

Basic pricing starts at $25 per month, and there is a 30-day free trial available.

Cincopa Secure Video Hosting

Since Cincopa prides itself on capturing user data and driving best-in-class analytics capabilities, it should come as no surprise that content managers can use viewer data to power security processes. Domain-level and geographic restrictions are easy to implement in Cincopa, and multiple layers of security can be established in bulk.

Cincopa provides end-to-end encryption for videos on its hosting platform that keeps your content safe from dangerous cyber-attacks.

Cincopa’s most valuable security integrations come with its $99 per month Corporate plan. This allows content managers to leverage user analytics to inform data privacy and security processes through role assignments, restriction setting, and more. It also offers valuable integrations with leading marketing automation tools like HubSpot.

Many of these features rely on Cincopa’s robust set of API solutions. There is a practical security reason for deploying an API-centric video hosting solution like Cincopa.

The automated transmission of data between trusted sources is less prone to attack and data breach than unregulated manual data entry. Secured APIs powered by user-to-data tracking offer far better security outcomes than error-prone manual processes.

2.   Vidyard

Vidyard is a well-known video platform that helps organizations to host and manage video content. It is primarily oriented towards marketing and sales teams, with a starting price of $80 per month.

Vidyard’s video security features include password-protected video sharing, IP whitelisting, and single sign-on (SSO). This gives content managers the ability to keep sensitive data out of the wrong hands.

Vidyard Video Hosting

But for all of its successes, Vidyard does not have the most intuitive design or content management structuring capabilities. This can complicate security compliance because it impacts the ability of content managers to assign and track permissions.

For instance, it is difficult to make bulk security setting changes to multiple videos at a time, and Vidyard does not let users organize videos into folders and subfolders for this purpose. If you have a large volume of video content, a task that should take a few seconds can easily end up taking hours.

3.   Brightcove

Brightcove’s cloud-based shared security model offers great flexibility and control for security-oriented content managers. It only offers personalized pricing plans, so there is no easy way to tell how much it costs. The platform is designed for enterprise marketers, IT teams, and advertising publishers.

Brightcove Video hosting

Brightcove is a large-scale B2B video platform designed for extensive client outreach. It has many useful features that enterprise users need, including role-based access control and data security. It leverages industry-standard security technologies to guarantee enterprise compliance.

Not everyone can use Brightcove, however. It is an enterprise software vendor looking for enterprise content creators. Organizations with less than a few hundred employees might find themselves priced out of the video hosting platform’s most valuable services.

Enterprises that need a top-performing video hosting site may find what they’re looking for with Brightcove. But that depends on the personalized pricing plan Brightcove’s team offers.

4.   Dacast

Dacast specializes in live streaming software, offering white label solutions for hosting on-demand content. Its platform revolves around the Dacast Broadcaster API, which automates the process of synchronizing live-streamed content throughout multiple mediums.

Dacast Video hosting platform

Dacast offers a variety of security features to content creators and managers. Geographic and domain restrictions protect content from being accessed outside of whitelisted zones. An in-player payment system ensures compliant content monetization. Dacast’s player even uses a clever dynamic token security system to constantly check and recheck that security restrictions remain in place.

With a starter plan that costs $39 per month, Dacast is situated ideally for law firms, medical clinics, and small academic institutions that need secure hosting services outside the enterprise sphere.

However, Dacast does have its downsides. The video hosting company only recently added transcoding to its list of capabilities and does not support as many encoders as other options on this list. Transcoding is incredibly important – if your encoder is not supported, you won’t be able to use the service at all – so new users should verify whether Dacast supports their workflow before signing up.

5.   Vimeo

Vimeo Secure Video Hosting

Vimeo is an online video hosting community designed for public and private content. Vimeo is often one of the first choices that small business video marketers turn towards for one important reason: Vimeo’s Basic subscription costs nothing, making it an easy free video hosting platform.

However, users who want to integrate sophisticated lead generation tools, analytics, and customization capabilities will need to pay for Vimeo’s priced plans. These range from $7 per month for 5 GB of content per week to $75 per month for unlimited live streaming, audience chat, and more.

Security-minded content managers will have to subscribe to Vimeo’s Pro plan at $20 per month to benefit from its data privacy features. These include password protection, domain-level privacy, and private link sharing – not the most sophisticated security features around.

Vimeo underdelivers when it comes to the value rapport between features and pricing. It does not generally provide the degree of customization that other hosts on this list offer. If you have the resources to purchase one of its high-priced enterprise subscription tiers, you almost certainly have better options for the money you’re willing to spend.

6.   Kaltura

Kaltura is a user-friendly live stream and video hosting provider that is well-respected among educators. The company has aggressively targeted universities, hospitals, and academic institutions that need on-demand video for education and training.

Kaltura Secure Video Hosting

Kaltura’s Learning & Development solution comes in two distinct packages – a 30-day free trial and an enterprise-ready annual package. The company does not divulge how much its services cost up-front. You have to contact their sales team in order to get an offer.

As an institution-oriented video host, Kaltura offers a comprehensive set of compliance options to users. It even has its own flexible video security API, which gives developers the ability to configure security settings on a per-video basis automatically. It’s the only entrant on this list to offer a fully-developed On-Premises edition of its hosting software.

Kaltura offers Digital Rights Management (DRM) in its platform, which is valuable for the institutional stakeholders it targets. While Kaltura’s video hosting software offers attractive security benefits, small organizations might find it too expensive to justify subscribing to.

7.   Wistia

Wistia Secure Video Hosting

Wistia is a business-oriented video platform. It features a wide array of integration tools and efficient customer service designed to help organizations make the most of their video content quickly. It is particularly well-suited for small and mid-sized businesses who wish to boost their video marketing efforts. Wistia’s pricing starts at $99 per month, with no free trial.

On the security and data privacy side of things, Wistia is GDPR-compliant. This means that European businesses (and businesses that serve European users) can safely rely on Wistia to host their videos.

Wistia’s security options tend to focus on keeping users from downloading video content. It is pretty good at this, but does not deliver the kind of comprehensive user security that more developed video platforms offer.

Wistia supports password-protected content and private link sharing, but does not include a robust role-management solution for streamlining access permissions across large audiences. It only distinguishes between account owners, account managers, collaborators, and viewers.

Key Takeaways

There is often a tradeoff between video security, compatibility, and hosting price. The right video host for your organization and its users offers a flexible, value-oriented balance between these factors.

Large enterprises typically have the resources to invest in highly customized hosting solutions, while smaller organizations have to leverage automation to remain competitive. While educators may turn to industry-specific solutions like Kaltura, most content creators and managers have to look at the options their specific infrastructure points them towards.

That might mean sacrificing transcoding capabilities for video security with Dacast. It might mean establishing a secure, programmatic video hosting framework with Cincopa. Take time to research the options and consult with experts before signing up for a video hosting platform.

Cincopa is a video hosting platform that offers best-in-class user analytics. Glean insight from your users and use that data to power better security, deeper marketing insight, and higher-quality content with our help

 

Originally published on September 9th, 2023, updated on September 12th, 2023
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Top 7 Secure Video Hosting Platforms [Updated 2023]

by Austin Jesse Mitchell time to read: 7 min
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