Video hosting for online courses, where the lessons stay yours
Your course platform is good at selling and organising lessons. It is not in the business of stopping the video inside them from being downloaded, recorded and re-sold — none of the big five offer DRM. StreamVault replaces only the player: the platform keeps the checkout and the students, the video gets studio protection, and it costs less than most people's coffee budget.
Studio DRM, identity watermarks, domain locking and member gating on every plan, from $12 a month. 7-day trial, no card. Below: what course video needs, which platforms it drops into, how to size a plan with the arithmetic shown, and the questions creators ask before switching.
What course video needs that ordinary hosting does not
The lessons cannot be downloaded
Studio DRM — Widevine, PlayReady and FairPlay — encrypts every lesson and hands the key to a secure decoder on the student's device, never to the page. Download extensions and stream rippers get nothing. Switched on per project, so a free preview lesson and the paid module can share one library.
A leak carries the student's name
A viewer-identifying watermark moves across the frame during playback. It does not prevent a phone pointed at the screen — nothing does — but a recording that surfaces on a piracy forum is traceable to the account that made it, which changes the incentive.
The embed only works on your course site
Whitelist your platform's domain and your custom domain; the player refuses to start anywhere else. A student who copies the embed code into another site gets a polite refusal, not your lesson.
Access follows enrolment
If you sell through Teachable, Kajabi, Thinkific, Podia or Circle, their login is the gate and the embed inherits it. If you sell from your own site, StreamVault's member accounts with self-signup can be the gate instead.
It plays fast, everywhere
Adaptive HLS from 300+ edge locations, with the first seconds served before the rest of the ladder finishes. Auto-captions in the lesson's language are included, with AI translation available for international cohorts.
It drops into the platform you already sell on
Every guide is the same shape — allow your domains, upload, paste the embed where the platform accepts HTML — with the exact clicks for that platform and what its mobile apps do with an embedded lesson.
Teachable
Teachable hosts lecture videos itself, without DRM, watermarking or signed playback.
Kajabi
Kajabi hosts course video itself (delivered through a third-party player), without DRM or per-viewer watermarks.
Thinkific
Thinkific hosts lesson video itself, without DRM, watermarking or signed URLs.
Podia
Podia hosts video itself, without DRM, watermarking or domain locking.
Circle
Circle hosts uploaded video itself, without DRM, watermarking or domain locking.
Your own site or LMS
Anything that accepts an iframe, plus a REST API, webhooks and Zapier for the rest.
Sizing a plan, with the arithmetic
Two numbers matter for a course: protected plays (one per lesson start) and delivery (roughly 1.1 GB per hour watched at 720p). Storage is rarely the limit — a 40-lesson course at 1080p is about 30 GB after encoding.
| Course | Plan | Why it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Launch cohort up to ~40 active students | Starter $12/mo | 40 students × 15 lesson starts = 600 protected plays; 40 × 5 h × ~1.1 GB = 220 GB delivered. Inside 1,000 plays and 1 TB. |
| Running course ~100 active students | Plus $29/mo | 100 × 20 starts = 2,000 plays; 100 × 6 h × 1.1 GB ≈ 660 GB. Inside 3,000 plays and 2.4 TB. |
| Academy ~200 active students | Pro $59/mo | 200 × 20 starts = 4,000 plays; 200 × 6 h × 1.1 GB ≈ 1.3 TB. Inside 5,000 plays and 2.5 TB. |
Beyond an allowance: $6 per 1,000 protected plays and $8 per TB delivered, opt-in, no forced upgrade. Bigger than this? Custom plans are quoted from the same two numbers.
Moving a course that already exists
From Vimeo, paste the links and the library is fetched, converted and captioned for you. From a platform's own hosting, download the originals once and upload in bulk or from a CSV of URLs. Videos already uploaded here can be protected in place — one click on the project re-encodes them with DRM without re-uploading. Then swap the embed in each lesson; free samples can stay where they are.
Questions creators ask before switching
Which platform do I need to host video for my online course?
You need two things that are usually sold separately: a place to sell and gate the course, and a place to host the video so it cannot be copied. Teachable, Kajabi, Thinkific, Podia and Circle do the first well and host video themselves without DRM, watermarks or domain locking. StreamVault does the second: the platform keeps checkout, members and lesson structure, and the player inside each lesson is replaced with a protected one. There is a step-by-step guide for each platform on the integrations pages.
Can students download the course videos?
Not with DRM on. Download extensions, stream rippers and right-click-save all need the media file, and with Widevine, PlayReady and FairPlay there is no unencrypted file to get — the key goes to a secure decoder, not to the page. What no vendor can stop is a phone camera pointed at the screen; the watermark makes that recording traceable, and hardware DRM blacks out screen recorders on iOS, Safari, Edge and most Android.
Do I really need DRM for a course, or is an unlisted Vimeo or YouTube link enough?
An unlisted link is not findable, and that is all. Anyone it is forwarded to can watch, the embed works on any site, and the file can be pulled with a one-click extension. If the course is free, unlisted is fine. If people pay for it, the videos are the product, and a product that can be copied in one click will be — usually within the first cohort.
How much does hosting a course cost?
Starter is $12 a month with 250 GB of storage, 1 TB of delivery and 1,000 protected plays; Plus is $29 with 1.2 TB, 2.4 TB and 3,000 plays; Pro is $59 with 2.5 TB, 2.5 TB and 5,000 plays. Beyond the allowance, plays are metered at $6 per 1,000 and delivery at $8 per TB, with no forced upgrade. A protected play is one lesson start, so a 20-lesson course watched once is 20 plays per student. The sizing table above shows the arithmetic for three course sizes.
I already have the course on Vimeo or on the platform's own hosting. Do I re-upload everything?
From Vimeo, no: paste the links and the library is fetched, converted and captioned for you. From a platform's native hosting, download your originals once and upload them in bulk or from a CSV of URLs; each video is encoded to an adaptive ladder and, if the project has DRM on, packaged in the same pass. Then swap the embed in each lesson. Free sample lessons can stay on the platform's player if you like — nothing is all-or-nothing.
Does the protected player work inside the platforms' mobile apps?
Where the app renders lessons as web content — Circle's apps do — the embed plays as it would in a mobile browser, with FairPlay on iOS and Widevine on Android. Check the platform guide for the one you use; each says what its apps do with an embedded lesson.