Working with Shared Videos
Media sharing allows publishers to upload videos once and then share the videos to other accounts. The accounts can be your own, corporate accounts or accounts of other publishers. The shared videos can then be used independently in other accounts. Media sharing is typically used when publishers want to keep a master account of video content and then share videos out to other divisions or subsidiaries of the organization.
Media sharing terminology
This topic will use the following terminology:
- Master - The account that created the original video. The Master owns the content and is responsible for setting up, managing and providing content to affiliates. The Master account will always be a Brightcove Video Cloud account.
- Affiliate - The account that is receiving the video. The affiliate can accept content shared to it from a master. Brightcove Campaign™ accounts are always affiliate accounts.
Managing media sharing relationships
Before videos can be shared from a Brightcove Video Cloud account to a Brightcove Campaign account, media sharing settings must be configured in the Video Cloud account. For information on how to do this, check the Video Cloud documentation.
After the Video Cloud account adds the Campaign account as an affiliate, the affiliate account must accept the relationship. Master and affiliate accounts can terminate the relationship at any time. Terminating a media sharing relationship does not remove any shared videos from affiliate accounts.
For information on Media Sharing settings, see Managing Media Sharing Settings.
Sharing videos
All videos shared to a Brightcove Campaign account will originate from a Brightcove Video Cloud account. For information on how to share videos from a Video Cloud account, check the Video Cloud documentation.
Shared videos in the Videos page
Shared videos will display a sharing icon in the upper left corner of the video thumbnail to indicate that the video has been shared into the account.
Click on the video title and review the Video Information properties to see which account shared the video.
Shared video properties
When a video is shared to an affiliate account, the following video properties are copied with the shared video:
- Name
- Short description
- Tags
- Thumbnail and poster images - By default, poster and thumbnail images for the master videos will be used in the affiliate accounts. If changes are made to the poster and/or thumbnail in the master account, those changes will be reflected in the affiliate accounts unless the affiliate account has previously generated new poster or thumbnail images. Once the affiliate account makes a change to the poster or thumbnail images, any changes to the poster/thumbnail made in the master account will not propagate to the affiliate account.
- Text Tracks - Affiliates do not have the ability to delete or edit the text track properties for shared videos.
The shared video has all the values for these video metadata fields that the master video had at the moment it was shared. However, from that point on, the master copy and the affiliate copy become independent entities:
- Video files are not copied when you use Media Sharing, only the video metadata is copied. The shared video points to the original video files in your account.
- If the video is deleted from the master account, the video is deleted from all affiliate accounts.
- Any changes an affiliate makes to a video will not affect the original. If an affiliate deletes a shared video, it is removed from the affiliate's account but remains in the master account.
- Affiliates can't remove or update text tracks.
- When affiliates receive a video by sharing, it is in the active state. This is true even if the video was not active in the master account.
- Each account is billed separately for playback (video plays and bandwidth usage) of a shared video from that account.
- Reporting about a shared video is specific to each account and does not aggregate information about each copy of the video in each account.
It is possible to reshare videos (share previously shared videos to the same account). Doing so will replace any video metadata changes made by the affiliate account with the values from the master (sharing) account. Use caution when resharing videos.