Where your videos are stored
Pedagio organises your courses, students and payments. It does not store your video files — those live in a hosting account that belongs to you.
The short version
When you add a video lesson to a course, you point Pedagio at a video that already lives somewhere else. Pedagio remembers the link and handles who is allowed to watch it; the file itself stays with your hosting provider.
This means you own your video library outright. If you ever stop using Pedagio, your videos are unaffected — they were never in our storage to begin with.
Supported hosting
You can mix these freely across courses, and change your mind later.
| Provider | Good for | Protection |
|---|---|---|
| YouTube (unlisted) | Free courses, previews, and anything you do not mind being shared | None — anyone with the link can watch |
| Vimeo | Paid courses on a budget, with domain restrictions | Moderate — playback can be limited to your domain |
| VideoKavach | Paid courses where piracy is a real concern | Encrypted, plus a watermark showing each student their own details |
| VdoCipher | The same, if you already have an account | Encrypted with per-viewer watermarking |
You are not required to buy anything
Connecting a hosting account
YouTube and Vimeo need no setup — paste an embed link when you add the lesson. VideoKavach and VdoCipher are encrypted providers, so Pedagio needs an API key to request playback on each student's behalf.
- 1Create an account with VideoKavach or VdoCipher and generate an API key there.
- 2In Pedagio, open Settings → Playback providers from your admin sidebar.
- 3Paste the key and save. It is encrypted before it is stored and is never sent to the browser — not even back to you.
- 4Upload your videos in your provider's dashboard, then reference them when you build a lesson.
Only the owner can change this
Why Pedagio does not resell storage
We used to offer video storage bundled into a Pedagio plan. We removed it deliberately, because it created a trap that was very hard to escape.
Videos uploaded that way lived inside our hosting account rather than yours. The day you brought your own account, the new key replaced the old one — and every video uploaded before that point became unreachable from your course pages. The files still existed, but nothing in Pedagio could address them, and there was no self-service way to move them across.
Rather than paper over that with a migration tool, we removed the cause. Every video you upload now goes into an account you hold the credentials for, so there is no version of this where your library ends up stranded behind someone else's login.
Marketplace courses are different
If you license a ready-made course from the Pedagio marketplace, its videos stay in the creator's hosting account and stream to your students from there. You do not need any hosting account of your own to sell licensed courses, and you are not billed for their bandwidth.
This is separate from your own library. Licensing a marketplace course never touches your playback settings, and your own videos are never served from a creator's account.