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Tailoring YouTube for Your Requirements

Did you know around 300 hours of video content is uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day? That’s a staggering amount of content.

However, while a huge amount of that uploaded content is harmless and innocuous – think fluffy kittens – YouTube is also the destination of choice for a large amount of content that may not be considered appropriate. The determination of “what is appropriate content” likely depends on the age of the viewer and the location of where (home, school, hotel or airport, etc.) that content is being viewed.

For example, adult-themed content is likely always considered inappropriate for minor viewers – whether at home or on-the-go. At the same time, viewing any adult-themed content in locations like retail stores, regardless of viewer age, is also likely considered inappropriate.

YouTube itself has very strict guidelines and policies around the type of content that can be uploaded, and it puts an enormous amount of effort into taking down content that breaches its policies. It also encourages the process of marking age-restricted content. When a video is marked as age-restricted, viewers must be logged in and 18 years of age or older to view it. These videos are also not shown in certain sections of YouTube. Typical age-restricted content might include violence, disturbing imagery, nudity, sexually suggestive content and portrayal of dangerous or illegal activities.

Perhaps you simply want to block all age-restricted YouTube videos no matter if a user is logged in or not. 

Well, there’s a really quick and simple way to do this.

Restricting YouTube content with Enterprise Threat Protector

The latest release of Enterprise Threat Protector now lets you apply a per-policy setting that configures the type of YouTube content that can be accessed. 

There are three settings for this: strict, moderate and unrestricted.

Strict mode prevents videos that have been marked as restricted by the uploader from being displayed. In addition, strict mode prevents videos that have PG-13 keywords in the description from being displayed. 

Moderate mode is very similar to Strict but does not restrict videos with PG-13 keywords from being displayed.

And, unrestricted is exactly as it sounds.

How it works

One of the benefits of using recursive DNS as a control point in Enterprise Threat Protector is that it’s relatively straightforward to enforce a change like this. When “Strict” mode is enabled on its policy and Enterprise Threat Protector sees a DNS request being made to youtube.com, it simply redirects the request to restrict.youtube.com. While you can do the same redirect on your DNS forwarder, it’s not as simple and straightforward as doing it with Enterprise Threat Protector, especially if you have numerous sites and forwarders to configure.

So, now you can quickly and easily control the YouTube content your users can view with just a simple page.

Learn more about protecting your guest wi-fi by reading this use case

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from The Akamai Blog authored by Jim Black. Read the original post at: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAkamaiBlog/~3/C5sEYsktsG8/tailoring-youtube-for-your-requirements.html