Course Website/App Builders or Video Platforms with Multi-Tenant Use Case: VdoCipher Solution

VdoCipher has primarily 2 kinds of customers in terms of their own working model –

1. First who stream online courses/tutorial/movie videos and directly showcase them to their viewers.
2. Website/App Builders or Video Platforms that serve multiple customers, and customers upload their own content to them. They provide solutions to many customers and each customer may have a separate website/app and video usage requirement.

Providing video hosting infrastructure to 2nd kind of customer requires a lot of additional features on the following front –
1. Backend embed and upload APIs and Player APIs
2. Video Management
3. Player and Video Settings Customisation so that the unique requirements of different customers can be fulfilled
4. Account management system where multiple customers can be served either through a single account or multiple accounts based on your requirement.

First, I am including a short summary of key security, player and video management features. And then, I will explain the features which enable multi-customer use cases.

Key VdoCipher features

1. DRM Encryption to prevent illegal video downloads. More details.
2. Screen Capture block in mobile apps, User-based watermarking for website playback. More details on screen capture block here and dynamic watermark demo here.
3. Domain Restriction & API authenticated playbacks. Domain Restriction Setting
4. Smart Custom Video player – Have controls and color as per your needs. Multiple qualities, multi-lingual subtitles, speed change, chapters, caption search and much more. Demo of custom player & Tutorial
5. AWS hosted cloud and Global CDN setup.
6. Video Management through dashboard and APIs. Upload Embed Tutorial.
7. Integration in website, android app and ios apps. Support for native, react native, flutter apps. Upload Embed Tutorial.

Additional features to support Multi-tenant use cases like –

• Website/app builders,
• Course or movie platform builders,
• Video platform partnering with multiple customers/partners

1. Backend APIs to automate the upload-to-embed process 

You might want that your customers to upload content on your platform and then that content should reach Vdocipher directly, without they having to interact with VdoCipher. We have Upload APIs that allows you to do this. You can have upload from browser , server or video url. Upload APIs here ,left panel has steps
We also have webhooks to let you know in an automated manner that video which is being uploaded is ready after processing.

On embed side, encryption is default there, you will be required to pass parameters to embed code for user-based watermark generation. You can click on “embed” button below any video in dashboard, and see the ‘custom backend’ section to check embed APIs. As you can see embedding via API has requirement to generate OTP, and there are various parameters like watermark, offline download, TTL , you can use different settings for different embed codes and thus different customers.

Overall API page

2. Video Management APIs 

Apart from upload and embed of videos, you might also want to manage folders, tags, video deletion, subtitle, thumbnail/poster images and similar other aspects through APIs. We have relevant video management APIs for you to do this.
We also have webhooks to let you know in an automated manner that video which is being uploaded is ready after processing.
Video Management APIs

3. Custom Player and Player APIs to fetch video events

We have player APIs for you to get video playback events like play, pause, watch time in particular video session (total covered and total played).
Player API reference
Watch time calculation API explained

You can also create multiple themes in a single account or in multiple accounts and use different player controls/color/theme for different customers.
Custom Player Tutorial here.

4. Fairplay DRM integration for multi-customers

We provide 2 DRMs Google Widevine (For desktop/laptop and Android Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Android App) , and Apple Fairplay DRM (For iOS Browser, iOS app and Mac Safari). While Widevine DRM is default integrated for all trial and paid accounts, integration of Apple Fairplay DRM requires a separate application process with Apple to get the license. There is no extra cost for this DRM, neither technically do you have to do anything. We guide you in the application process, a stringent requirement from Apple is that either the content owner should apply for the license or the platform which has distribution rights to content should apply for the license. So if you want to use a single Fairplay license for all customers, you must have the distribution rights to their content; or else customers can apply Fairplay DRM themselves.
In case Fairplay DRM is not integrated, then we still have proprietary encryption available for iOS.

To understand more on this and apply for Fairplay DRM, kindly contact us at support@vdocipher.com

5. Account Management and Customer-specific analytics

There are 2 ways in which you can handle multiple customers/partners.
      1. Different accounts for your different customers – If you have few customers, then you can create different accounts for each customer. If you want to give access of account to both yourself and the customer, it is possible as we allow multi-user access (upto 4 users) to account with various levels of restriction.
That way, each customer can directly look into their usage in the dashboard and also manage things themselves. Also, the usage and analytics is already separate into accounts and you can share it with customers/customer can see themselves.
But if you do not want to give access to these individual accounts to customers, that is also fine as you can manage upload to embed process directly via API.
Please note that in this case, you will have to integrate multiple vdocipher API keys at your backend, as each account will have separate api key.

Overall API page

Payments for this case– We can provide such that you pay in bulk on regular basis based on the total consumption of all accounts. The plans will be prepaid only but you need not buy for a year in advance, you can buy for shorter periods.
Or if a customer or you are paying separately for their account directly to us, it is also fine.

      2. Single account for your multiple customers – This is specially needed where you have lot of customers and can not give each of them a separate account access and at the same time you will not want them to access your big account as it also has videos from your other clients. So below is how you can use a single account for multiple customers

• You use upload APIs to get videos uploaded from different customers. You either make separate folders for separate customers or tag them separately. Once you upload a video to us, you will get a video ID. Webhooks are there to know when the video is ready.
• You can click on “embed” button below any video in dashboard, and see the ‘custom backend’ section to check embed APIs. As you can see embedding via API has requirement to generate OTP, and there are various parameters like watermark, offline download, TTL , you can use different settings for different embed codes and thus different customers.
• For bandwidth usage per customer, you can use the bandwidth usage API here. 
• For Storage data, you can download CSV from dashboard which provides video specific data like duration, storage. If you are looking for API for storage data, then please contact us.Overall API page

Payments for this case – You can make bulk payment for the whole account based on usage. The plans will be prepaid only but you need not buy for a year in advance, you can buy for shorter periods.

For any queries about this, please mail to support@vdocipher.com (all our tech support people see this), we can also set up a video call and explain in more detail. To know more about our Flutter video player, do check out the blog.