Secure video hosting for online courses — no ads, no borrowed players

Video hosting for online courses is a service that stores lessons and displays them within your course: without ads, without recommendations, and only for those who have enrolled.

It seems like a technical issue. In reality, it’s a financial one. Researchers Justin Reich and José Ruipérez-Valiente looked at all MIT and Harvard courses on edX over six years and published their findings in Science in 2019: 3.13% of participants completed free courses in 2017–2018. But among those who paid for a verified certificate, the figure was 46.02%. Fifteen times higher.

A paying student isn’t a random passerby. They came to learn, and they’ll make it to the last lesson. So every lesson has to open fast, play without ads, and not leak to someone else’s site for free. This is the job of video hosting for online courses.

People watch free courses. They finish paid ones.

Every course platform has its own video hosting service, and that’s enough to get you started. The question is where it ends. (How video fits into the LMS, builder, and hosting mix is covered in the article video hosting for e-learning.)

• Teachable offers up to 1 TB of video on all three plans, but free subtitles and translations are only available on the Growth plan ($139 per month when billed annually). The video plays in the Hotmart player.
• Thinkific meters course video bandwidth: 200 GB per month for Start, 400 GB for Grow, and 1,000 GB for Expand (from $109, $219, and $499 per month when billed monthly). Videos embedded from external hosting are not included in this limit.
• Kajabi accepts files up to 4 GB, and its video runs on Wistia.

Let’s do the math. A 1080p stream is approximately 5 Mbps, or about 2.25 GB per hour of viewing. 200 GB of Thinkific Start equates to approximately 89 hours of viewing per month for the entire school. Thirty students, three hours each, and the month’s allowance is gone.

Imagine Elena: she teaches an online watercolor course from Minneapolis, with 48 lessons on Thinkific. A short wet-on-wet clip gets a million views, and 300 students sign up in a month. Each student watches about six hours. 300 x 6 x 2.25 GB—about 4 TB, twenty times her plan’s limit.

With separate video hosting for online courses, Elena uploads lessons to VodSpot, embeds them in the same Thinkific lessons, and video traffic is no longer counted there or by us: VodSpot doesn’t charge for traffic. Storage counts only the source files: 48 lessons in 1080p fit into Solo’s 150 GB. And if tomorrow she launches a course on her own website, the same lessons are embedded there too.

Your platform sells the course. Your host delivers the lessons. Don’t make one do the other’s job.

You can. Many creators start with unlisted videos on YouTube: free and familiar. Here’s what you give up.

Unlisted videos, according to YouTube, “can be seen and shared by anyone with the link.” The lesson link is a password that the student can forward to anyone, and they can watch it without an account. Only YouTube Studio Content Manager partners, not regular course authors, can restrict embedding to their domains. And YouTube’s terms of service give it the right to monetize any of your content—including running ads before a lesson your student paid for.

And finally: at the end of the lesson, YouTube will suggest the next video. Not yours.

With video hosting for online courses in VodSpot, the lesson ends when you decide: the end-of-lesson screen can display your button—“next lesson” or “book a consultation” (Pro and above).

YouTube is free because your students are its audience.

DRM encrypts videos so that only trusted players can play them. Sounds like something a paid course would need. It almost never is.

First, the price. Vimeo offers DRM as an add-on to its Enterprise plan, and according to Vimeo’s help, DRM-protected videos may be capped at 720p in some environments. Bunny Stream offers basic protection for free, but full DRM starts at $99 per month plus a per-license fee.

Second, DRM doesn’t stop the main method of course piracy—screen recording or shared logins. That’s solved by access, not encryption: your course platform’s login, embeds locked to your domain, and analytics that show which website the lesson is playing on.

Is there any reliable research on how much course authors lose from piracy? We’ve looked. Figures like “15–30% of revenue” travel from blog to blog, but they don’t lead to any research. Therefore, we don’t repeat them.

Honest video hosting for online courses doesn’t promise the impossible. VodSpot has no DRM—it has domain restrictions, no public links to files, and embed analytics.

Someone determined will copy a lesson. Your job is to make sure no one gets it for free.

The best lessons are short and come with quick checks. Harvard psychologists Karl Szpunar, Nicole Khan, and Daniel Schacter cut a 21-minute online lecture into four 5.5-minute sections and inserted short quizzes between them. Students’ minds wandered at 19% of check-ins versus 41% without the quizzes, and they scored 90% on the final test versus 68% (PNAS, 2013). The quizzes live in your course platform. The host has to handle dozens of short lessons with ease.

Students speed up. In a survey of 123 UCLA students, only 15% typically watch lectures at normal speed, 60% at 1.5x, and 23% at 2x. An experiment by the same group showed that comprehension barely suffers at speeds up to 2x (Murphy et al., Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2022).

Students turn on subtitles even when they can hear well. A survey by Oregon State University, conducted in collaboration with 3Play Media, a company that produces subtitles, found that 70% of 1,567 students without hearing impairments use them at least sometimes to concentrate and remember better (Linder, 2016). How to make subtitles and the player accessible is in our accessible video guide.

So here are the questions for any video hosting for online courses:

• Is the player free of ads and third-party recommendations? Even at the end of the lesson?
• Can embeds be locked to your own domains? On your plan, not just on enterprise?
• Are there captions, chapters, and speed control? Right in the player, at no extra charge.
• Is bandwidth billed or capped? What happens when the course takes off?
• Can you see who finishes your lessons? And on which websites they’re embedded?
• Can the lessons be transferred to another platform? Or are they locked within one?

With VodSpot: yes, yes, yes, no cap, yes, and yes. Prices are on the pricing page, and a comparison of course platforms is in the article best video hosting for online courses.

A good lesson is short. A good host lasts as long as the course.