Geo-filtering your Videos

You can use Brightcove's geo-filtering feature to restrict access to content based on the viewer's geographic location. For example, if you have a video that, for legal reasons, cannot be distributed outside the U.S. and Canada, you can set geo-filtering on the video to keep viewers outside of the approved countries from accessing that content. You can also use geo-filtering to restrict access to players.

The ability to use geo-filtering to restrict videos is a feature available to Brightcove Pro or Enterprise publishers for an additional fee. Contact Brightcove if you want to upgrade your account to include Quova geo-filtering. Features of video geo-filtering include:

• Filtering technology is facilitated by Quova, a leading provider of geographic monitoring services.
• Quova makes daily updates to the IP address database used to filter content, resulting in more accurate geo-filtering.
• Filtering is supported for over 240 countries and regions defined by ISO-3166.
• Advanced geo-filtering can be applied to individual videos or to players.

Geo-filtering can be either exclusive or inclusive of the list of countries you select. This means that you can specify countries that should have access to the content in question (inclusive). Alternatively, you can specify countries that should not have access to the content in question (exclusive).

Using video geo-filtering

If video geo-filtering is enabled for your Brightcove Pro or Enterprise account, you can set geo-filtering using the Media module. You can use geo-filtering either to restrict your video to one or more specified countries, or to allow your video to work everywhere except one or more specified, excluded countries.

To set geo-filtering for videos:

1. In the Media module, select one or more videos and click Edit > Scheduling & Geo Filtering.
2. Under Geographic Filtering, select Prevent viewing from the following countries and select the countries in which you want your player to be blocked, or else select Allow viewing from the following countries and select the countries in which you want your player to be available. You can include or exclude any of the more than 240 countries and regions defined by ISO-3166. You can use the Filter field to search for countries in the list, or click Select all or Select none.

   

3. Click Save Changes.

Special notes

Note the following:

• If you filter the list of countries using the text filter box, and then click Select all, only the countries in the filtered list will be selected, not all the countries.
• The video details pane displays the geo-restricted countries, but only if you have included or excluded 50 or fewer countries. If you have included or excluded more than 50 countries for a single video, the details pane instead uses the label "Selected:" to show you the total number of countries included or excluded.
• For the purposes of geo-filtering, the United Kingdom (gb country code) includes Guernsey (gg), Jersey (je), and the Isle of Man (im); those islands cannot be treated separatedly from the United Kingdom.
• For better alphabetization, we have converted non-ASCII characters in country names to their ASCII approximations. For example, we list Aland Islands and Cote d'Ivoire, not Åland Islands or Côte d'Ivoire.