With Spotlightr, you have the freedom of hosting your videos wherever you want! With it does come a few drawbacks as well.
If it is more cost-effective for you, you can use your own storage space and link a video in Spotlightr. You are basically just pasting a link from a third-party source.
For a list of supported sources please check this article. If your source is not listed here it might still work. If the video link/URL is publicly accessible, and basically plays the video when you load the link in a browser, then it will very likely work with Spotlightr.
Hybrid Hosting advantages:
Save storage space in Spotlightr. We are not copying or moving the video over from those external sources. We are playing the video from it's external location but using our player
Save bandwidth as you would not be using the Spotlightr CDN. Same idea as storage. We are not moving/copying the video to our cloud/infrastructure
All Publishing options like embed code and watch page still work
Most features still work
Hybrid Hosting disadvantages:
Performance might not be as good. Since we are using the video from it's source location, it's also using that systems bandwidth and storage. We have less control on the overall environment for playback, so issues can arise that may be out of our control.
We cannot retrieve multiple resolutions and your viewers cannot change the resolution that is best for them based on their internet speed (except for Youtube...this is now possible with Youtube links). We try to retrieve the highest resolution possible.
**Important notes regarding Youtube**
As stated above, we are now able to retrieve different resolutions of your Youtube. We cannot however retrieve the 1080 version video at this time.
Also, Youtube videos may not work with Spotlightr if they were very recently uploaded to Youtube. We've also noticed that videos with zero views or just a few views don't work either. So if you just uploaded a video to Youtube and you are trying to link it and it doesn't work, please allow some time to pass and try again. And also be sure to get at least 5 or 10 views on the video as well.It is not possible to download your video back from Spotlightr or via the download video button in the player settings. This is because we don't copy the video over to your account, we are simply using the video from the source where it sits.
These videos cannot be encrypted (exceptions are videos uploaded to S3 from Spotlightr), Other security features still work however, as you can secure them with the password protection feature and restrict them to play only on desired domains
Bandwidth of source video provider will be used for streaming. This can be both an advantage and disadvantage. You do save on bandwidth from your Spotlightr account, but if there is a problem with their infrastructure there is nothing we can do about it.
Subtitles cannot be loaded if the videos are hosted externally
We cannot auto-detect the aspect ratio of your video
Thumbnail of video frames while scanning timeline not available