Sharing Commercial Video: 

In order to have discussions with students about the videos during class, Faculty have asked how they can show videos in real-time, in their online class that is hosted within the web conferencing software. The videos in question have ranged from those on Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, or other streaming services, to videos on YouTube, clips from DVDs, Kanopy or the Marist library video databases.

Technical Considerations

Watching videos together live using Zoom can present some technical challenges:

• Faculty (and student) computers can be a constraint when trying to screen-share a video in Zoom without choppiness.
• Copyright protection on paid services and media will prevent the video from being shared with the Zoom application, showing only a blank grey screen. To determine if the video you want to watch has copyright protections, do a test before your class to see if a colleague can see the video.  

• Screen sharing videos from services such as Netflix or Amazon Prime to others, particularly those without paid accounts on those services, is in violation of the terms of service for those providers.  Faculty should not use Zoom to screen share videos from those paid providers.

• If you want to watch a video with your class which is hosted in Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc. and don’t want to ask all of your students to get a paid account in that service, visit Kanopy or the Library Streaming Reserves to see if the video can be obtained and streamed by the library.

Recommended Solutions

To optimize your live class time with the students, our recommendation is that you use one of these other approaches to meet your learning goals:

• Require students to watch the video on their own, before a particular live class meeting, and then discuss during the live class (as mentioned above, note that if the video is in a paid streaming service such as Prime or Netflix, students will need to have a paid or free trial account to do this).

• For shorter video clips, during a live class meeting, post the link to the video in the Zoom chat (or post before class in the course website). Pause the live class for the length of the video, ask students to click the link and watch the video on their own computer while muting their Zoom audio/video feed, then return to the Zoom class meeting to discuss.

• Have students convene in the live Zoom meeting, each mute their Zoom audio and start playing the video on their own computer at the same time. Use Zoom text chat or other group text chat application for “sidebar” conversations in real-time, as the video plays on each student’s computer.

• If the video is a long film, consider asking students to start the film at the same time and comment during the screening on Twitter, Zoom chat, and also stop the film at certain points so the class can discuss the section they have just seen in a Zoom meeting.