Media Sharing

Media sharing is a feature of Video Cloud that lets publishers share videos with other publishers, enabling you to more easily manage videos across multiple accounts. Media sharing puts you in control of sharing relationships with other accounts in your organization, and helps you provision copies of your videos to these accounts. These shared videos can then be programmed and used independently in your affiliates' Video Cloud accounts. You can use media sharing to upload files once into your organization's multiple accounts, and even create archive accounts for keeping track of popular shared content.

Media sharing is available only for Video Cloud Pro and Enterprise customers with multiple accounts. If you are interested in upgrading your Video Cloud account, please contact Brightcove for more information.

• Enabling media sharing
• Media sharing and user roles
• How to share videos
• Shared videos in the Media module
• Working with shared videos
• Accepting videos shared to you
• Automatically accepting shared videos
• Sharing videos with custom fields
• Sharing videos with required fields

Enabling media sharing

To enable media sharing, contact Brightcove Customer Support and have them turn on media sharing for your account. Brightcove Customer Support will also need to turn on media sharing for each affiliate account with which you want to share. You'll also need to get the Video Cloud account ID for each affiliate account with which you want to share.

Media sharing is available only where both accounts are in the same region and are both in one of the following regions:

• North America
• Europe, Middle East, and Africa
• Japan
• Korea
• Australia and New Zealand
• Other East Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, etc.)

Note that if you want to end a media sharing relationship with an affiliate account, you need to contact Brightcove Customer Support to do so. Also note that ending a media sharing relationship does not remove from the former affiliate's account any videos that you have already shared with it. If you want to remove shared videos from a former affiliate's account, you need either to get the former affiliate to agree to delete them, or delete them from your own account before you end the media sharing relationship.

Media sharing and user roles

By default, the ability to share videos is available to all users in your account with access to the Media module. You can change this setting so that only users who have been assigned the Admin role are able to share videos in the Media module. Read more about user roles.

To enable only Admin users to access video sharing in your account:

1. Sign in to the Video Cloud Studio as a user with the Admin role.
2. On the Video Cloud Studio Home page, click the Account Settings link at the top right, under the navigation bar. You must have Administrator privileges to access this area of the Studio.
3. On the Account Settings page, click Media Settings.
4. Under Media Sharing Access, select Administrators Only and click Save Changes.
   

How to share videos

Once media sharing is enabled for your account and for your affiliates, there are three methods you can use to share videos from your account to your affiliates' accounts:

• Using the Media module
• Using the Media API
• Using FTP batch provisioning

Shared videos in the Media module

If media sharing is enabled for your account, then the Media module displays your shared videos. You can identify all the videos in your account that have been shared from other accounts by the video's icon in the Media module:

 – videos shared to this account

Videos in your account that have been shared from another account have a "Shared By" entry in the Details pane, identifying the account from which the video was shared.

You can identify the videos you shared to other accounts by this icon:

– videos shared from this account

When you delete a video that you have shared, the Media module displays a dialog reminding you that deleting the shared video in the original account will delete it from all the accounts you've shared it with:

In the library tree, the Media module includes Shared as a choice for viewing your shared videos.

The Shared view in the Media module displays videos that have been shared to your account, but which you have not yet accepted into your media library. See Accepting videos shared to you.

Working with shared videos

When you share a video with an affiliate publisher, a copy of the video is created in the affiliate's Video Cloud Media Library. Once you have shared a video, your affiliate can see the video in their account in the Media module.

The following metadata of a video are copied to the shared video:

• Name 
• Short Description 
• Long Description 
• Reference ID (If any of the affiliate accounts that you are sharing with already have a video with the same reference ID, the sharing operation fails with an error message. You can avoid this by setting up reference ID naming conventions that prevent affiliates from using the same reference IDs.)
• Related Link (link text and link URL) 
• Tags 
• Thumbnail
• Video Still
• Economics (No Advertising / Advertising)
• Force Ad Request On/Off
• Ad key/value pairs
• Allow viral distribution On/Off
• Scheduling start date and end date
• Geo-restriction (Geo-restricted videos can only be shared with sharee accounts that are also Quova-enabled.  Sharing a geo-restricted video to an account that does not have Quova enabled will cause the entire share action to fail, even if some of the sharees do have Quova enabled.)
• Custom fields. See Sharing videos with custom fields for information about how to handle the case where the two accounts may not have the same custom field definitions.
• Cue points with their associated metadata

The copy has all the values for these video metadata fields that the original had in your account at the moment you share it. However, from that point on, the original copy in your account and the shared copy in your affiliate's account 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.
• Any changes you make to the original in your account will not affect the shared copy in your affiliates' accounts. However, if you delete the video from its original account, the video is deleted from your affiliates' accounts.
• Any changes an affiliate makes will not affect the original or any other shared copies. If the affiliate deletes a shared copy, it is removed from the affiliate's own account, but remains in the original account and in the account of other affiliates it has been shared to.
• When your account receives a video by sharing, it is in the active state. This is true even if the video was not active in the account that shared the video to you. If you are using the metadata assurance feature, the video will be active even if it is missing a required field.
• An account that receives a video by sharing cannot pass that same video on to another account by sharing. Only the original account can share the video.
• 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.
• If you are using Video Cloud to transcode your videos, do not attempt to share videos until the transcoding process is complete (which could take several hours). If you share videos before transcoding is complete, your affiliates will receive videos that are incomplete and which may consist solely of metadata with no video files.

Note that logo overlays (both account level and video level) and bumper videos are not copied while using media sharing. If a video has a burned-in logo, the shared video will include the burned-in logo. Also note that when you share a video, the video's last modified date is updated, even if you have made no other changes in the video.

Accepting videos shared to you

When you select Shared, the Media module displays all the videos that have been shared to your account, but which you have not yet accepted into your account.

The Shared view displays for each video its name, the name of the account from which it was shared, the date it was shared, and a reference ID, if any. From the Shared view, using the action toolbar at the bottom, you can:

• Click Accept to accept the shared video into your account. Note that you also have the option to automatically accept videos shared by affiliates that you designate.
• Click Edit to edit the properties of the video.
• Click Delete to reject the shared video and not include it in your account. Rejecting a shared video does not prevent your affiliate from sharing it to you again in the future.

Once you accept a shared video, it no longer appears in the Shared view in the Media module, and it appears in the All Videos view. 

Automatically accepting shared videos

By default, when you share a video with an affiliate, the video does not become part of the affiliate's Video Cloud media library until it is explicitly marked as accepted in the Media module. If instead, you want to automatically accept videos shared to you:

• you need to mark the affiliate as one from which you will automatically accept shared videos, and
• when your affiliate shares a video with you, the affiliate needs to mark the video as eligible for automatic acceptance.

To mark an affiliate as one from which you will automatically accept shared videos:

1. Sign in to the Video Cloud Studio as a user with the Admin role.
2. Click the Account Info link at the top right, in the navigation bar, and select Account Settings. You must have Administrator privileges to access this area of the Studio.
3. On the Account Settings page, click Media Settings. The Studio displays a list of all the affiliate publishers with which you have established a media sharing relationship.
   
4. Under Approval Method, select Automatically Approve for each of the affiliates whose videos you want to automatically accept.

When an affiliate who has been marked for automatic approval shares a video with you, they need to mark the video as eligible for automatic acceptance. How they do that depends on the method they use to share the video:

• For videos shared using the Media module, all shared videos are marked as eligible for automatic acceptance.
• For videos shared using the Media API, set the auto_accept parameter to true in the share_video method.
• For videos shared using batch provisioning, use the auto-accept-shared="true" attribute in the title element for the video.

Sharing videos with custom fields

If two accounts use custom fields for video metadata, you need to decide what happens if the two accounts use different custom fields. You can configure your account for the behavior that works best for your applications, choosing between these two behaviors:

• If the two accounts have different custom fields for videos, the fields that match identically will be shared, and the non-matching custom fields will be ignored.
• If the destination account does not have a custom field that is defined in the source account, the sharing operation fails with the message Custom Metadata conflict. The destination account is permitted to have additional custom field definitions that are not in the sharing account.

You can configure in the sharer account how custom fields work with media sharing:

1. Sign in to the sharer account in the Video Cloud Studio.
2. Click the Account Info link at the top right, in the navigation bar, and select Account Settings. You must have Administrator privileges to access this area of the Studio.
3. On the Account Settings page, click Media Settings on the left.
4. Under Media Sharing Settings, select Require custom field matching, if you want sharing operations to fail if the custom fields in the destination (sharee) account don't match exactly the custom fields in the source (sharer) account.

For accounts that were created or set up with media sharing before July 8, 2010, the Require custom field matching setting is turned on by default. For accounts created or set up with media sharing on or after that date, it is turned off by default.

Sharing videos with required fields

The metadata assurance feature lets you designate which metadata fields are important for your business purposes and then require your users to complete the required metadata fields for new videos before the videos can become active. If a shared video is missing fields that are required in the sharee account, the shared video will remain inactive until the required metadata is supplied. Read about Using Metadata Assurance with Media Sharing.