How production companies deliver final video files to clients
One link that screens the cut and hands over the file.

The client opens one URL. The finished film plays there at the quality it was exported at. If the producer has switched downloading on for that film, a download button on the same page hands over the original file. When the client comes back with one more note, the producer uploads the new export in place of the old one, and the link the client already has now plays the new cut. No second email, no second expiry date, no version confusion about which of three links is the real one.

Everything else on this page is detail about that shape: which of the tools you already pay for actually implement it, where each one stops short, and the cases where you should not consolidate at all.

Review platforms do jobs one and four well and treat job two as an export. Transfer services do job two well and barely attempt job one. Cloud drives do a downscaled version of job one and a good job two. Consumer hosting does job one at the platform bitrate and gates job two behind a paid plan. Nothing is broken in any of them. They were built for different problems, and a final delivery sits across all four.

The client gets a clean address of the form uncompressed.io/your-handle/film-slug. The player on that page is fed the file you uploaded, with no transcode step anywhere in the pipeline, so what the approver sees is what you exported. The honest trade is on the other side of the same fact: there is no lower rendition to fall back to, so a thin connection buffers instead of quietly switching to a mushy version.

Access has five modes: private, password, unlisted, public and embed only. Embed only means the film plays inside an iframe on your site and the watch pages return a 404 to everyone but you. Passwords are per film and are available on every plan, including the free Starter plan. The check happens on the server before the page renders, the code never travels back to the browser, and attempts are rate limited by IP. You can change or remove the password later without the URL changing, so a screener can become a public case-study page the day the campaign goes live.

The handover of the actual file is a per-film switch labelled for what it does: allow the original-file download, so viewers can save the master. There is no tier gate on it. Leave it off until the invoice is paid, which is the behaviour a producer wants, and switch it on the day the file is theirs to keep.

Re-delivery is the part that changes how a week feels. Uploading a new version swaps the stored file, its size, duration, frame rate and dimensions on the same record. The id, the slug, the visibility, the password and the view count are untouched. The client refreshes the page they were already looking at. Any embed of that film on your site or in a proposal now plays the new cut with no code change.

On the clean handle URL you also get the owner-side record: opens, plays and view rate, unique visitors, average view time, average percent watched, finishes, a retention curve, top countries and top referrer sources, over 7, 30 or 90 days or all time. That answers the two questions producers actually ask at the end of a job. Two things are not shipped: download counts and bandwidth figures are not available today, so nobody should plan a report around them.

The client mandates the review tool. Agencies and brand teams often run approvals inside a platform their procurement already signed, with named reviewers, retention rules and an audit trail attached to it. Fighting that is a losing argument and a second place for notes to go missing. Deliver into their tool, on their terms, and keep your own copy of the master somewhere you control. Frame.io in particular is a better review product than any hosting platform ships, and if the round already lives there, that is where it should stay.

The deliverable is a spec handoff, not a screening. Broadcast masters, station or platform delivery packages, and anything an operator ingests against a written delivery spec never touch a browser. The receiving end wants the file, a checksum, a sidecar and a naming convention, in the transport their operations team specified. A page with a player on it adds a step to a job that is really a file transfer with paperwork. Use the transfer route the spec names, and keep the link for the humans who approve the creative.

One 200 GB drop to one recipient, once. If the job is a single handover of a very large package to somebody who will never watch it in a browser, per-gigabyte transfer pricing is honest and cheap, and a storage subscription is the wrong shape. MASV at $0.25 per GB pay as you go, with 15 GB of transfers a month free, exists for exactly that job.