Field59 now offers to offer full support for HTTPS video delivery. This will allow for the delivery of video via secure network connections over HTTPS.
What is HTTPS?
On the web, HTTP is the protocol that you see at the start of a website uniform resource locator (URL). The website address
https://www.field59.com
is a nice URL with http at the start of it. All website addresses either start with “http” or “https”. The extra ‘S’ on https means “secure”. Previously, https was widely used for online banking and shopping websites, but now is growing in popularity for all websites, as awareness of internet privacy and security issues increase.
Encrypted Communication
When you see an https URL, that means your web browser — whether it’s Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari or another browser — is making an encrypted communication with the website. Platform providers like Field59 need to make sure that the data being delivered (in our case, things like videos and all code needed to generate video players) is communicated over both http and https methods. (You may also see references to “SSL” or “TLS” when talking about secure delivery. Those stand for Secure Sockets Layer and Transport Layer Security, which are the types of encryption used in an HTTPS connection.)
Starting in 2017, we’ve released an elegant solution for all videos on the Field59 platform. By slightly modifying the embed codes generated by the Field59 manager, it now doesn’t matter whether our video players are placed on an http or https website — it will work in either environment. The player handles all the work of figuring out if it needs to render in http or https.
What do I need to do?
If you are an existing customer thinking about switching your websites over to https, you’ll have to run one update for all of your players that were previously located at http URLs. An http URL will not load on a website after you switch over to https. You’ll simply need to create a script that finds all URLs that start with http://cdn.field59.com... and change them to https://cdn.field59.com....
For those using Field59’s MRSS feeds to syndicate content (to other platforms, such as OTT apps), you can similarly just change the MRSS URL from http to https, and receive only secure URLs to your content.
Finally, for customers using our API, we will add an optional request parameter to return https URLs.
Field59 ensures customers can serve video and players in either secure or unsecure web environments. If you have any questions, please contact customer support.