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Video Sharing for Friends and Family Only?

Quick question from a friend for all you videobloggers out there. What’s the best video sharing site if I want to post some video, but then password protect it so that only friends and family can access it?

This would probably work much like Flickr’s friends and family settings, though bonus points for something that doesn’t require every friend and family to register for an account first.

Here’s one less secure alternative, if you trust your friends and family. Google Video enables you to exclude an uploaded video from its search database. That means that they only people who will ever see it are those who access it via a URL. If none of your trusted circle give the URL to a non-trusted party, then you’re golden.

Mind you, that’s somehat insecure and, to quote Roland, ‘security by obscurity never works on the Internet’ (or something to that effect).

Any alternatives? Maybe every video sharing tool does this, but my 34-second search left me wanting.

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Published by dbarefoot

Darren Barefoot is an author, speaker and digital strategist. He’s the co-founder of Capulet Communications, and co-author of “Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook”.

18 comments

  1. YouTube does Family/Friends sharing, although they dod have to have an account there. Do recall though that Flickr used to be just like this and only recently added the Guest Pass feature.

  3. Have a look at http://www.orb.com where you can set your PC up to stream all your media stuff to other PCs. (bit like a Slingbox) You can set any file with a sharing URL to give to your contacts and they won’t be able to access your other stuff. However you remain the host here so bandwidth may be an issue, but at least you don’t have to upload the file anywhere which is cool if you want to share say a whole movie with someone.

  4. Thanks for those–YouTube is probably the best option. Interestingly, I looked at my YouTube account, and it wasn’t immediately apparent how to make a video private. Regardless, I pass these solutions on.

  5. I hemmed and hawed over this very issue myself recently and then decided to go with YouTube, making the video public but not tagging it. I figure that’s enough for it to get lost in the millions upon millions of other videos, most of which are actually trying to get seen.

  7. You can set the private/public flag on YouTube after uploading each video.

    What we wanted to do was upload family videos as private and then embed them in our own (obscure) family blog, but no dice. A video has to be public in order to be embedded (which makes sense but is not the functionality we wanted). So we also do the no tagging thing.

    Since the video services live by people sharing videos and generating page hits for related searches, I can see how they might be reluctant to provide privacy as a free service.

    Google’s excluding option sounds like the way to go, I wonder if that is available in general for website content?

  9. Waitaminit, aren’t you a big shot Technologist? The obvious lightweight solution is self-hosting on a decently friendly Apache-y hosting system (Dreamhost or whatever), and throwing down with an .htaccess file in your video directory.

    It ultimately depends on how many friends you have, and how much video you want to serve. Likely to beat Youtube quality, though.

  10. You should check out http://www.stashspace.com (disclosure, I am a co-founder). You can record video direct from your camcorder, mix it with other videos in your account, share it privately/securely, or post mash-ups to your blog. You can also edit in video that has been shared with you by other friends & family in your network.

    Better yet, we’ve been offering our web-based video editing and sharing tool since 2001, so chances are your videos will still be around in 5 years when most of the other video sharing sites are long gone.

  11. Flixee.com just opened a beta site, and they have a feature (Flixee Friends) that allows you to restrict access to a video to only peopl ein yoiur friends list.

  12. Try http://www.buzdeo.com, Buzdeo seems to be aimed at Friends and family market for secure and private sharing. Unlike a number of video sharing sites it ensures that any content that is posted remains the property of the owner, I found some very scary terms in some other sites, that basically made you sign away all rights of your material.

    I spent some time looking around to find a site that i could post safely to to share family videos with my relatives, I would recommend Buzdeo, as being secure and easy to use. Although you do have the option of making videos public be default all videos are privately shared.

  14. I actually used the comments in this blog helped me find Vimeo. Thanks. Pretty much exactly what I wanted as far as private sharing and simplicity goes. Added perk is that they let you upload HD videos as well.

  15. i signed up for zshare.net and uploaded my videos on private and I was still able to post them them on my website…

  16. I tried vimeo.com and it is awesome and free.

    It lets you share, password protect, and still have a setting to embed with password.

    Thanks for the post Johny!

  17. Hi, try http://www.kinkast.com. It allows you to share videos directly from your iPhones through their app or through your pc or mac through their website. It allows you to email your friends and family members a link to your own private website without them needing to set-up account. You can even splice your videos with the app before sharing them with your friends.

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