Film festival screener hosting.
The problem is not the festival. It is your own sprawl.

The mixing happens innocently. You make one unlisted link for the submission platform, then paste the same link into an email to a programmer, then into a message to a sales agent, then into a press kit. Four months later that one URL is in more inboxes than you can name, and if it turns up somewhere it should not, you have no way to narrow the list.

It is worth reading what an unlisted link actually is, in the platform’s own words rather than in the way filmmakers use it. Vimeo’s help centre states that unlisted videos will not appear in public search results, and that they can be accessed and shared by anyone who has the video’s unique URL. That is an official statement that the link is transferable. It is a perfectly reasonable instrument for a submission copy. It is the wrong one for anything with an embargo on it.

Two habits make the record hold. Fill the row at the moment you issue the link, never at the end of the week, because the detail you will want later is the one you did not think worth writing down. And issue one link per person rather than one link per stage: a single screener shared with a jury of five is one row and five unknowns, while five rows is a list you can act on.

Whether the platform helps depends on which one you use, and the documentation is worth reading before you rely on it. Vimeo documents viewer-level analytics as a CSV download in showcases, reporting the team member’s email address, and states that results will only appear for logged-in team members and not for signed-out viewers, on an Advanced or Premium plan or an Enterprise plan with the Events feature added. A festival programmer opening a link from an email is not a logged-in team member. That is not a criticism of Vimeo, it is an argument for keeping your own record regardless of the platform.

The structural fix is to keep versions on one film rather than spawning a new link for every cut. On uncompressed.io versions, per-version approvals and timecoded comments are shipped: a new cut sits alongside the previous ones on the same film, a decision is recorded against the version it was made about, and a note lands on the frame it refers to instead of in a paragraph that says “around the forty minute mark”. Pair that with the version identifier in your inventory and the question of what somebody watched stops being a guess.

The picture matters more here than in almost any other kind of sharing, because a programmer is judging the photography. The player streams the exact bytes you uploaded, with no transcode anywhere, so a 150 Mbps export plays at 150 Mbps and the grade a colourist signed off is the grade on the programmer’s screen. Browser playback is H.264, HEVC and AV1. An 8K master plays when the viewer’s hardware decodes it, which is a real caveat on an unknown machine in an unknown office. Camera RAW is a different matter entirely: it never streams and never plays in a browser, so the screener you send is always an export.

Start from what is actually possible, because the marketing in this category is worse than the technology. Screen recording cannot be prevented in a browser. The W3C’s Encrypted Media Extensions specification says it directly: this specification does not define a content protection or Digital Rights Management system. Nothing published by the standards body describes a browser API that stops a viewer recording their own screen. Anyone who tells you a web link cannot be captured is selling you something.

What is possible is a set of controls that shift the odds and, more importantly, change what happens after a copy escapes. A visible session watermark deters, because a viewer who can see their own name burned into the frame behaves differently. A forensic per-person mark attributes after the fact, from a recovered copy. A short-lived link closes the window rather than leaving one open forever. A view log tells you whether the thing was even watched, which is more often the useful answer.

This is the practical failure of a festival season far more often than a leak is. A selection committee outside your language asks for a subtitled version, usually with less notice than you would like, and the burned-in copy you made for one territory is the wrong file for the next one. A sidecar subtitle file is easier to swap per territory than a burn-in, because a burn-in is a re-export and a permanent decision while a sidecar is neither. uncompressed.io has a captions feature: the track is produced by a speech-to-text model and it is editable. That is the whole claim, and the practical point stands regardless of which tool you use, so record which language track went with which link in your inventory. The burned-in versus sidecar decision and the captions guide cover the mechanics.

Where the film lives afterwards is a storage question rather than a security one. Pro is $25 a month or $250 a year with 500 GB hot. Max is $75 or $750 with 1.5 TB hot plus 1 TB cold. Studio is $250 or $2,500 with 2 TB hot plus 2 TB cold. Bandwidth is not metered on any of them, which is the part that matters during a run: a film that suddenly gets watched by forty programmers in a week does not cost more than one that gets watched by nobody. The hot and cold arithmetic sizes the archive side properly.

If you take one thing from this page, take the inventory. It costs nothing, it works with any platform, and it is the difference between answering a leak question and shrugging at it. If you take two, take the separation of the submission copy from the private screener, because that is what makes the inventory possible in the first place.

Everything after that is a judgement about stakes. Most festival campaigns do not need watermarking at all, and this page is not going to invent a festival rule to sell you one, because no festival body page we could retrieve states such a rule. When there is a commercial embargo on the film, the controls that exist are worth using, and the honest description of them is that they deter, attribute and limit the window rather than make a copy impossible. The screener security guide goes control by control through what each one stops and what defeats it.