Embedded Vimeo Videos

Way back in 2014 we sponsored the Welsh Independent Schools Council's annual conference, and had some interesting discussions with the attendees. One of the comments that stood out to us was that schools would often like to block access to YouTube whilst still allowing the YouTube videos that are embedded in educational web sites. Of course, this can always be done by manually whitelisting the individual videos, but that's a very onerous task for the ICT staff, especially if the website in question is large and frequently updated with new content. What they needed was the ability to whitelist an educational site and just tick a box to whitelist any embedded YouTube videos too.

Two years on, and this feature is still one of our unique selling points - despite its obvious utility, no other filtering system has this capability.

However, now a number of educational resources have started hosting their videos on Vimeo - an ill conceived idea, given the amount of adult content which is also available on Vimeo, but one which schools have to work with. Whilst Vimeo is an excellent resource, they also host a huge amount of more questionable material, and schools are often quite reluctant to allow unfettered access to it.

With our existing system for YouTube already working well, extending it to also accommodate Vimeo has been straight forward. Now, when adding a website to a whitelist, Iceni administrators will find an extra Apply to Embedded Vimeo Videos option. Just tick that and the Vimeo videos embedded in the site will also be whitelisted without opening up access to the whole of Vimeo.