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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 the other Brightcove 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 can also be implemented programmatically using the CMS API. For more information, see Media Sharing with the CMS API.

Media sharing terminology

This topic will use the following terminology:

Media sharing limitations

Managing media sharing relationships

Before videos can be shared between accounts, media sharing settings must be configured as part of the ADMIN > Media Sharing settings. Note that only account administrators have access to the Admin menu. If you wish to share videos to other accounts, affiliates must be added and the affiliate accounts 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. If you want to remove shared videos from an affiliate's account, you need either delete them from your own (master) account or open the video properties, go to the Media Sharing section, and click the Remove Video icon for the affiliate account.

For information on configuring the Media Sharing settings, see Managing Media Sharing Settings.

Sharing videos

By default, the ability to share videos is available to all users in your account with access to the Media module. To share videos, follow these steps:

  1. Open the Media module.
  2. Select one or more videos and then click More > Share.
  3. Select the affiliate account(s) to share the video(s) to and then click Share. The search field can be used to search for an account ID. The search field supports fuzzy searches so entering part of an ID will return matches.

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.

Reviewing shared videos

Affiliate accounts have the ability to configure an Acceptance Mode for each master account. When the Acceptance Mode is Auto, shared videos will appear in the affiliate account's list of videos in the Media module. When the Acceptance Mode is Manual, a Shares Pending link displaying the number of shared videos will appear in the Media module.

{% if site.product_short == "Video Cloud" %}
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{% endif %}

Clicking the Shares Pending link will display the list of shared videos.

From the shares pending list, you can:

Quick View can be used to open a panel to view video properties. Once you accept a shared video, it no longer appears in the Shares Pending list in the Media module, and it appears in the All videos view.

Shared videos in the Media module

Shared videos will display a sharing icon in the upper corner of the video thumbnail to indicate that the video has been shared into or out of an account.

Video shared into an account

Hovering over the sharing icon () will display sharing details.

Video shared to another account

Hovering over the sharing icon () will display sharing details.

Master accounts can see the status of videos shared to affiliate accounts using the Media Sharing section of the video properties page.

Errors may also appear here. For example, if Enforce custom field matching is checked, the affiliate account must have the same custom fields as the master account or any shares will fail.

Deleting shared videos

When a shared video is deleted from a master account, a message is displayed reminding you that deleting the shared video will delete it from all the affiliate accounts you've shared it with.

Shared video properties

When a video is shared to an affiliate account, the following video properties are copied with the shared video:

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:

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.

Shared video renditions

Videos can be shared to affiliate accounts before transcoding has completed. Affiliate accounts that receive the shared video will have access to the renditions that were created in the master account. If the video in the source account is retranscoded, or if the source file is changed, those changes will occur in the affiliate accounts that receive the shared video.

Affiliate accounts are unable to retranscode or replace the source file for a shared video.

Shared media and billing

We often get questions on how media that is shared between accounts affects billing. Below are a few scenarios that explain how billing is handled for content that is shared between publishers.

Scenario 1

Scenario 2

Scenario 3

Scenario 4 - Content must be fetched from Origin

We pass along the account ID in every request so that each account is billed for its own origin access. So if the Sharer account frequently misses its CDN cache and has to go back to origin for content, then the Sharer will be billed for that. If the Sharee account frequently misses its CDN cache and has to go back to origin for content, then the Sharee account is billed for that. Charges for Origin access stay separate regardless of the CDN config scenario.

Scenario 5 - Images

As with video usage, consumption of images for shared videos by the affiliate account's viewers will be charged to the affiliate account.