The practice of placing a video player on a web page so visitors can watch without leaving the site.
Video embedding is the process of inserting a video player into a web page using a snippet of code — typically an iframe or a JavaScript tag. The video itself is hosted elsewhere, but it plays directly on your page. It is like hanging a painting from a gallery in your office — the gallery stores and maintains the original, but visitors to your office see it as part of your space.
The most common embedding method uses an iframe: a small HTML element that loads an external page (the video player) inside your page. When a visitor loads your site, the iframe fetches the player from the hosting platform, which then streams the video from its CDN. The hosting platform handles all the complexity — transcoding, adaptive streaming, playback controls — while your page just provides the container.
JavaScript-based embeds offer more control. Instead of loading a full external page, a script tag initializes a player directly in your DOM. This allows deeper integration with your site's design and behavior, such as triggering actions when a viewer reaches a certain point in the video.
Responsive embedding ensures the player resizes correctly across screen sizes. Most modern hosting platforms provide embed codes that automatically adapt to their container, so the video looks right on desktop, tablet, and mobile without extra CSS work.
Embedding keeps viewers on your site. Unlike linking to YouTube or Vimeo, where visitors leave your page and enter a platform full of competing content and ads, embedding gives you full control over the experience. Your brand stays front and center, you retain the traffic, and you can track exactly how people interact with the video.
For marketing teams, this means better conversion rates because viewers never leave the landing page. For product teams, it means seamless integration of tutorial and onboarding videos. For anyone using video, embedding is the difference between owning the experience and renting it.
host.video provides a white-label player with zero third-party branding. Embed with a single iframe or JavaScript snippet, with support for custom domains so the player loads from your own domain with automatic SSL.