Make your embed Youtube video works in China

Objective:
To make your website videos great again.

A Forbes article says video is of the seven important areas which can improvement a website user experience and engagement.

Many companies agree and add Youtube videos to their websites. Why Youtube? No cost, easy to use (to embed videos in webpage) and easy to consume (to watch and to share, from enduser perspective). Besides some other downsides, one major challenge of using YouTube video on your corporate website is that YouTube is blocked in some countries (China, for example). So you neither can tell your story using Youtube nor you provide a good UX to all users.

It is not unusual to see broken content… it is not great:(

Solution:
Even Google cannot make Youtube works in China. I cannot too. What I am trying to do is to add user location-awareness to the website. To make a website to show different content to users in different locations.

I Cloud can do all things. I am going to use different cloud services to demonstrate the solution.
The key element is a DNS service with Geolocation Routing capability, such as Verizon Route and AWS Route 53. There is one hostname an and URL only. No need to remember xxx.com, xxx.com.cn, xxx.com.jp, etc.
cdn.53.cheungwaikin.com/video.html

 

Geolocation Routing lets you choose the resources that serve your traffic based on the geographic location of your users, meaning the location from which DNS queries originate.

 

Demo setup:

1. a webpage (a) with Youtube video, hosted on a AWS S3 bucket
2. a similar webpage (b) using a mp4 video, hosted in another AWS S3 bucket
3. webpage (a) is accelerated by KeyCDN for Europe, and AWS CloudFront elsewhere
4. webpage (b) is accelerated by ChinaChina for China and Japan
5. AWS Route 53 is configured to resolve the hostname cdn.53.cheungwaikin.com to
   • ChinaCache CDN URL for users located in China or Japan
   • KeyCDN CDN URL for user located in Europe
   • CloudFront CDN URL for user elsewhere

AWS Route 53 Geolocation Routing setup

Verification:
We will use VPN service such as VyprVPN or Hola!VPN to connect to different locations and then browse cdn.53.cheungwaikin.com/video.html and see what content we get. Below video showing that I received the webpage (a) (with embed Youtube video), then I got the webpage (b) when I was using Hola!VPN to connect to Japan.

Cool?

Wish you a joyful weekend:)

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