Private Sharing requires your invited Viewers to log into Wistia. If this is not what you’re looking for, check out our require password feature. All your Viewers need to do is enter in your secret word to the video’s password gate — no login necessary!

Private Sharing in Wistia allows you to add Viewers and Collaborators to your individual folders and give them specific accesses and controls around to your content there. Wistia medias in your account aren’t crawled by search engines, so until you share them (via direct URLs, or embedded on your website) they will remain private.

If you’d like to share your content with a few people (but not the whole world), you can share a direct link.

Private sharing may be right for you if you want to:

You will only need to use Private Sharing if you want to further restrict access to your content, invite users to add or update content in your folders, or share and monitor internal content.

Wistia Private Sharing is structured around allowing access to Wistia folders and granting permissions to users or groups of users. To access the permissions modal choose Share to the right-hand side of the folder's title.

From within the Permissions modal, you can control who can access the folder and what actions they can perform within the folder. These options allow you to further secure your medias within Wistia, and invite other users via email addresses to interact with your content.

First up, let’s explore controlling general access to the folder and then the difference between Locked and Unlocked folders.

At the top level of the permissions modal you can control whether or not ever user in your Wistia account can access the folder, as well as control the specific actions they can take within the folder.

Anyone in my account allows all users invited to your Wistia account can access the folder. These permissions can be further customized to allow anyone within your account to either view or manage the contents of the folder.

Can view - can access and play media in the main folder and any subfolders

Can manage - can access the folder and perform the following actions on media inside the folder:

Only invited users allows only specified users who have been added to the folder can view the contents and take additional actions based on the permissions set by Managers or an Account Owner.

Wistia folders can be set to two states: Locked and Unlocked. By default all new Wistia folders start in the Unlocked state. This doesn’t mean your videos are indexed in search engines, just that any direct links shared to the video can be accessed without a login.

To set a folder to the Locked state, you’ll want to click the Share button on the folder page.

Then select "no access" from the drop down menu next to "Anyone else with the link"

When a folder is locked only invited users can access the folder. Anonymous visitors and users in your account who are not added to the folder will not be able to access it.

When a folder is unlocked anyone with the link (meaning all visitors, logged in or anonymous) can take actions based on the permissions selected in the drop down menu

Locked/unlocked states can coexist with general access permissions. In other words: it's possible to restrict folder access to only invited users while also allowing anyone with the link to view the folder. Logged in users who were not added to the folder will not be able to see it in the Content Library, however if they have a copy of the folder's URL they'll be able to access it anonymously.

A Locked folder within Wistia can only be accessed with a specific invite from:

From within the Permissions modal, you’re able to add users as Viewers or Collaborators.

Adding Viewers is a simple way to keep your folder Locked, but still allow a select group of people access to view your content.

From the folder page, select Permissions from the left menu. You can also click on the padlock icon next to the title of the folder.

Enter the email addresses of Viewers you’d like to add to your folder. You can even write your own message by clicking Personalize email notification.

Make sure to click the Save button to add your Viewers, and you’re all set!

If you’d like to give your users more control around your folder, you’ll want to invite them as Collaborators. The steps will look similar to adding a Viewer, but this time you’ll select which permissions you want those Collaborators to have. The moment you select a permission, the user’s status will turn to Collaborator!

The permissions available are:

To add a Collaborator to your folder, select Permissions from the left menu (or click the padlock next to the folder title).

Enter the email address of the Collaborator you’d like to add, and set their permissions. You can add multiple Collaborators with the same permissions by entering a comma between the email addresses.

Make sure to click the Save button to save your settings!

To delete any Viewer or Collaborator from your folder, you’ll want to head back into the Privacy & Sharing Settings modal from the Overview panel on the left, by clicking Permissions. Next to each user you’ll see a small X. Click the X, and make sure to hit the Save button.

To edit the permissions for any Collaborator on your folder, you’ll want to head back into Permissions from the Overview panel on the left. Next to each email address you can check and uncheck any permission box. Make sure to Save your new settings!

User groups are a way to share content privately with mutliple users at a time. Leveraging this feature is done via the Users page.

Just like with folders, the Account Owner and Managers in an account have access to create Channels. They can upload content, customize, turn on podcasting, and more! The Account Owner and all Managers can take any and all actions to create and customize a Channel. You can also add Users to a Channel by selecting Permissions.

Any Collaborator added to a Channel will have access to add new content, customize, download, and enable podcasting. They have full access to all of a Channel’s features.

The Account Owner, Managers, and Channel collaborators can set a Channel to be locked. Once locked, Channel collaborators and viewers must log in to access it.

For more information on Channels, as well as their permissions, head on over to the Channels page.

If you are looking to Password protect your media rather than sharing privately to users on your account, check out our require password feature. All your Viewers need to do is enter the password to the video’s password gate rather than be signed in as a User on the account.

At this point, no. If you’d like more stats around your Viewers' experience, we recommend embedding your video behind a paywall or login on a third-party site. This will give you access to all of Wistia’s core stats features, and keep your content private. Private User Sessions will only show Viewer and Collaborator heatmaps.

To maintain account security, we cannot add Viewers or Collaborators to Wistia accounts. You should contact whoever originally invited you to the Wistia account to request more access.

Yep! We have IP Filtering functionality for that.