This feature requires a Vimeo Enterprise account with single sign-on enabled.
On Vimeo Enterprise, you have the ability to share videos behind a single sign-on (SSO) gate so that your employees are required to be authenticated in order to access the content.
Leveraging SSO on your videos allows you to take advantage of the following benefits:
- Ensure your content is extra secure and can’t be accessed by anyone outside of the organization - even if they get their hands on the link or embed code
- Track and analyze team analytics for your colleagues who have authenticated with SSO before viewing your content, so you can measure in-depth consumption & engagement by your organization
You can share videos behind SSO via a direct link or even via the embed code. Read on to learn how to set up the SSO gate on your videos.
Skip ahead:
- 1. Set up SSO
- 2. Set your video to Private
- 3. Provide folder or content permissions
- 4. Share or embed the video
- User experience
1. Set up SSO
First, enable SSO on your account. If you’d like to share videos with all users at your company with SSO, we recommend you set up just-in-time provisioning as part of your SSO configuration.
⚠️Note: You have the ability to set up SSO for one SAML connection or for multiple SAML connections, depending on how your organization is structured and manages user identity.
- If you’ve only set up one SAML connection, the gate on your videos will simply direct you to that specific IdP.
- If you’ve set up multiple SAML connections, your users will have to type in their email so Vimeo knows which SAML connection they should be authenticated with.
2. Set your video to Private
After setting up SSO, navigate to your video and set the privacy setting to Private. Private only allows users on your Vimeo account to access the content, so after you’ve set up SSO on your account, the video will prompt your team member to authenticate using your company SSO.
See our privacy settings overview for a full breakdown of all video privacy settings.
💡Tip: If you want multiple videos on your team’s Vimeo account to have an SSO gate, you can bulk update videos in your library to the Private setting. If you are the owner, you can change this for all videos in your account settings.
3. Provide folder or content permissions
After users authenticate with SSO, they must also have permission to view that specific video. Otherwise, they will still not be authorized to access.
Therefore, you must ensure that you’ve granted permission to the content for your intended audience. This might be meant for all users, a specific SSO user group, or a specific person.
You can either navigate into the folder that contains the video or into the video directly and select Share. Then, give permission to the correct user or user group. If you want to share with everyone in your organization, type in “All.”
4. Share or embed the video
Now that SSO has been enabled and you’ve updated permissions on the video, you can grab the link or embed code and share it with your audience.
User experience
Below we describe what the user experience is like for logging into a shared video with SSO when your account has been set up with one SAML connection.
Logging in with SSO into a video link
- Open the link to your video in your web browser.
- Click Sign in with SSO.
- Authenticate with your identity provider.
- After you’ve authenticated, you’ll be redirected to the Vimeo page to watch the video.
Logging in with SSO into an embedded video
⚠️Note: Currently, you can only log in with SSO onto an embedded video on demand. The ability to log into an embedded live event will be coming soon. For more information, reach out to your account manager.
- Open the page where the video is embedded. If this video is being viewed internally, your organization may require you to authenticate with your company SSO in order to access the page first.
- Find the embedded Vimeo video on the page. Click Sign in and then Continue.
- ⚠️Note: Ensure you’ve enabled cookies in your web browser in order to take the most advantage of Vimeo embeds.
- A modal will open for you to log into Vimeo. If you’ve already logged in with SSO to view the internal page, the active IdP session will automatically authenticate you into Vimeo and automatically close out without requiring you to take any action.
- After you’ve authenticated, the player will refresh and you’ll be able to watch the video.
Multiple identity providers
If your company has multiple IdPs and you’ve therefore set up multiple SAML connections, you will have to type your email address into the Vimeo login form since Vimeo won’t automatically know which IdP to redirect you to. The experience will be as follows:
- Click Sign in.
- Type your email address into the login form that appears.
The form will hide the password field after you’ve typed in the correct email address. You should then click Log in with SSO. - You will be redirected to the SAML connection that your email address is associated with, where you will authenticate with your identity provider.
- After you’ve authenticated, you’ll be redirected to the Vimeo page (or the embedded video will refresh) so you can watch the video.