Check out these 2 podcast episodes I created about hosting premium media, more specifically, videos, in a members-only area and charging for them.
Video Hosting For Your Membership Site
Audio/PDF Hosting for Your Membership Site
If you simply want a place to host your videos, then Vimeo Pro is a great option. And for a large number of videos (which themselves are generally large in size), if you don’t wish to go broke with video hosting fees, then Vimeo Pro is your best option, because you get fixed-price hosting and unlimited views. Plus Vimeo Pro has a cool “domain whitelisting” feature where you can configure the video to only play from your domain. That gives it a bit of added security.
However, just hosting the video on Vimeo and embedding those videos on your web site alone is not going to turn your web site into a pay-for-content membership site.
You will then still need to secure the pages that have the video embed code, so you can make sure that only authorized members (those who have paid for it as part of a video course, or as a single video, or someone who has gained legal access because you gave them access to it, or they purchased a subscription or paid a one-time payment) are the only ones who are able to access it.
You will need to automate payment processing, account creation, enable the ability for them to get a username and password, a page for them to log in, automatically get access to all of the content that they paid for, get a welcome email, be able to send them updates via email, have features like password-reminder and password-sharing-prevention, etc.
For all of that, you will need a full-featured membership platform like DigitalAccessPass.com (DAP).
If you’re on WordPress, there are a number of great membership plugins available, and DAP is arguably the best (I’m the Co-founder & Co-developer of DAP, but don’t let that stop you from checking out what what the best - aka DAP - has to offer :-).
And if you need to protect more than just videos - like say, audio - maybe insert a audio player on your pages, or provide the link to download PDF or Doc reports, etc, then I recommend you use Amazon S3 for that, and check our plugin that lets you protect videos, audio, PDF, doc, zip, etc, at S3MediaVault.com - Secure Audio Player, Video Player & File Protector for WordPress Sites .
– Ravi Jayagopal
Business Coach, https://SubscribeMe.fm/coaching/ .