http://www.theinvisibleblog.com/2014/01/vimeo-hide-this-video-from-vimeocom.html
Sometimes you need to share a video with people without making it available to the entire internet community, and password protection is not the preferred method. I recently had this issue come up when I needed to post a music video that was being shopped around to various online outlets (blogs, new agencies, etc.), but the client’s PR firm didn’t want the people to have to use a password.
Anonymity is your friend in these situations; a link that is published nowhere is often as “secure” (at least as inaccessible) as a published link that is password protected. If people don’t know where to look, they can’t find/see the video.
Vimeo has recently added this functionality to their Pro accounts (YouTube has had it for a long time), but I was having a heck of a time getting it to work.
When I ticked “Hide this video from Vimeo.com” in the privacy settings of my video, the video was marked with a “private” sash/label in my video listings. When I sent the link to people to view, accessing the page simply returned a message stating:
Permission Denied
Sorry, there is no video here.
Either it was deleted or it never existed in the first place. Such are the mysteries of the Internet.
Very frustrating. The whole point of an unlisted link is to be able to send it to people so they can access the video.
Turns out Vimeo’s unpublished functionality ONLY works with embed. So a video that returns the above message when you send the link IS visible to others, but ONLY when embedded.
The work around (to send a link), is simply to place the word “player” at the beginning of the link and to make sure “video” is in the path. So, “http://Vimeo.com/hiddenlink” can be accessed as “http://player.vimeo.com/video/hiddenlink”
Why Vimeo has it set up this way is beyond me, and they need to fix it so you can share your hidden video with links more easily (without having to figure out this workaround on your own since it is posted NOWHERE on their site).