Access control on hosted video: How to make a hosted video accessible only after login?

Question

I am building a SMALL subscription-based educational video site (openly accessible examples of similar technical implementations would include RailsCasts Pro, Egghead.io Pro, Codeschool.com, etc.) where users pay to get access to a certain array of videos.

Obviously, I don't want to spend time on reinventing the video hosting wheel, so I would like to use a hosted solution for that.

Now, googling "hosted video access control" or anything like that hasn't yielded any meaningful results, since it seems to be the wrong search phrase - this has less to do with access control and more with restricting video access based on some from of authentication & authorization. My guess this would be in practice implemented by some token system.

I'm having trouble of knowing where to start.

My questions are:

1) What is the de facto way of doing access control to videos on these subscription video sites? 2) Are these providers doing it from scratch; is there a provider that has a easy to setup, simple and affordable solution for this; or is there a set of tools that you can use to build the system? 3) Are some of the major video hosting providers such as YouTube, Vimeo, etc. usable for this kind of a use case, perhaps using some 3rd party solutions to handle the access control part?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Although not a definitive answer, the best thing so far I've found is Wistia (http://wistia.com/product). And Udemy (http://udemy.com) is a more controlled learning video / online course environment.