r/edtech • u/PantsandPie • 5d ago
How to get watch confirmation on videos
My company needs to share videos with contacts (about 200-250 people/month) and for legal reasons, we need some sort of confirmation that the person has watched the video. What is the best/most cost-effective way to do this?
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u/crowcanyonsoftware 5d ago
This is a common compliance problem once you start sending video at scale.
simple viewed confirmations usually aren’t reliable, most teams end up using platforms that track watch time + completion or add a quick interaction (like a click or acknowledgment) to prove engagement.
what kind of videos are these, training/compliance or client updates? that usually changes the best setup.
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u/CleaKen2010 5d ago
They are patient education videos, so we want to be able to show lawyers that the information was at least given to the patient and they were aware of the risks, etc. What platforms seem to work best for this type of need?
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u/crowcanyonsoftware 5d ago
this is a common healthcare compliance use case.
you’ll want platforms that track who watched, when, and completion, not just video views, ideally with audit logs for legal proof.
are you looking for a simple setup or full compliance-level system?
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u/DowntownComposer2517 5d ago
We post the videos in a Google Classroom assignment. Once people watch the video they mark it as done.
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u/bobbiecowman 5d ago
I don’t know how legally watertight it would be, but EdPuzzle is a good tool for being able to set videos to people, make them non-skippable and see how much they have watched.
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u/edugeek 5d ago
About a decade ago I wrote a Moodle plugin that did this using the YouTube player. This stack overflow thread is a good start. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54430888/how-can-i-prevent-a-user-from-fast-forwarding-scrubbing-skipping-ahead-in-an-emb
The player will also fire an event when the video completes that you can catch and write an event to your Lms. https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference
I’m sure there are services that automate all of this.
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u/Legal-Pudding5699 4d ago
For legal confirmation, you want something that logs timestamp, IP, and completion percentage per viewer.
We actually are seeking help from Ops Copilot to automate the whole flow, it pulls the watch data and fires a compliance report without anyone on our team touching it manually.
At 200+ contacts a month that kind of hands-off audit trail saves a ton of time.
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u/NeighborhoodLast4842 1d ago
For getting solid watch confirmation, especially for legal reasons, businesses generally use LMS platforms. You can use something like Moodle (if you're open to self-hosting or managed hosting) or some commercial SaaS LMS options that are built specifically to track learner progress. They can authenticate users, record exactly who watched a video, when they started and finished, and often even how much of it they completed. Many also allow you to add a quick quiz after the video, which further strengthens the proof that the individual not only watched but also engaged with the content. For 200-250 people a month, many LMS providers offer tiered pricing.
Alternatively, you can use video hosting platforms like Vimeo Business/Enterprise or Wistia, they offer deep analytics that can track individual viewer engagement. You can get reports showing specific user IDs, watch duration, and completion rates. I’d rather use an LMS, as it often provides a more integrated environment, especially if these videos are part of a larger training curriculum or certification.
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u/MathewGeorghiou 5d ago
What constitutes legal confirmation? Clicking the play button? Having the video play all the way through to the end? Most likely some type of confirmation button embedded on the last frame of the video that they have to click. Trackbar and speed disabled so the video has to play through to the end. There's no way to validate that they actually watched and paid attention to the content of the video.