What is a CNAME and how can I use it?
You may have noticed an option to add a CNAME record within your Sharing Page and Video Hub set-up pages. The article below explains CNAMEs and how they can benefit your video strategy.
What is a CNAME?
A CNAME is a type of DNS record that maps an alias name to a true or canonical domain name.
This means you can mask the domain for a set of webpages and make them appear to be hosted elsewhere.
Why use a CNAME?
CNAMEs are essential when using Vidyard sharing pages or hubs, as some domains may be blocked outright without SSL/HTTPS. They're also crucial for both brand consistency and marketing automation.
Domain and brand consistency
When you first set up a Vidyard account, you will notice that your sharing page and video hubs are hosted on the vidyard.com domain. When you provide someone with a link to either of these options, the web address may not appear as relevant to you or your business.
Adding a CNAME record allows you to use your own domain on these pages. Visitors can seamlessly transition between your website and both sets of pages without even knowing the content exists on two separate domains.
Marketing automation
Hosting a video hub or sharing page on your own domain is a significant benefit if you are tracking video view data with a marketing automation platform (MAP).
MAPs identify users on a domain-by-domain basis.
- If someone visits your site and fills out a form on your page, that identification will be associated with a MAP cookie, but only for activity on your domain.
- If the same person visits your Vidyard-hosted sharing page, your MAP will not recognize the activity on your domain for the video view that occurred on your Vidyard hub or sharing page.
- By masking a Vidyard hub or sharing page with a CNAME, your MAP can recognize activity from your domain and the video view from your sharing page as occurring on the same domain and therefore belonging to the same visitor.
Adding your CNAME in Vidyard
To use a CNAME, open the settings for either your sharing page or your video hub in Vidyard. From there, you can edit the type of domain that the page uses (a Vidyard-hosted domain versus your own custom CNAME) by changing the Route Type.
You can find out more about this process by checking out our article on How to use HTTPS for your sharing page or hub domain.
Ensuring your CNAME is secure
By default, the two Vidyard-hosted domain options for sharing pages and hubs (share.vidyard.com and *.hubs.vidyard.com) use HTTPS. This ensures that the connection between Vidyard's server and your viewers' web browsers use TLS to encrypt the transfer of data. HTTPS is also a visual cue that indicates to visitors that your web page is secure and trusted.
If you choose to use a custom CNAME (e.g. *videos.yourdomain.com) for your domain, take a look at How to secure your sharing page or video hub with HTTPS to get started!
Helpful resources related to HTTPS
If you’d like more information on HTTPS security and related terms, check out these helpful resources:
Redirect behavior when changing route types
In most cases, if you change the route type for your sharing page or video hub (for example, from share.vidyard.com to a custom domain name), Vidyard automatically redirects traffic from the previous URL to the new URL.
In cases where you change your domain from a custom CNAME to any other route type (including a different CNAME), pages may continue to redirect so long as:
- your previous CNAME is still valid
- you maintain a record for your previous CNAME in your DNS and it continues to point to the correct URL
See the table below for details.
| Current route type | New route type | Result |
Default subdomain (share.vidyard.com) |
Vidyard subdomain (*.hubs.vidyard.com) |
Redirects |
Default subdomain (share.vidyard.com) |
CNAME (your own custom domain) | Redirects |
Vidyard subdomain (*hubs.vidyard.com) |
A different Vidyard subdomain ( |
Redirects |
|
Vidyard subdomain ( |
Default subdomain (share.vidyard.com) OR CNAME |
Redirects |
| CNAME (your own custom domain) | Default subdomain (share.vidyard.com) OR Vidyard subdomain (*.hubs.vidyard.com) |
Redirects if you maintain a record of the previous CNAME in your DNS and it points to hubs.vidyard.com
|
| CNAME (your own custom domain) | A different custom CNAME | No redirects. Links to previous URLs will 404. |
Additional considerations
- You can use the same CNAME across various hubs and sharing pages as long as you add a
/path to the end of the URL (e.g. videos.acme.com/videohub, and videos.acme.com/videohub2). That said, we recommend leaving external-facing video hubs at the root of a subdomain for sitemap SEO.
- If you use a CNAME and have social sharing enabled, be aware that Twitter may not whitelist your domain to allow inline playback.
- If this is the case, the sharing page URL will show in the tweet, rather than rendering the video inline.
- To resolve this, head to the Twitter Card Validator and request whitelisting for your domain. This can be achieved by entering a CNAME-based sharing page URL.