Why Doesn’t My YouTube Video Play in My Church App?

With the Tithe.ly custom church app, we want to make sure you have the best possible experience by being able to integrate content from a variety of sources such as Youtube. That does mean, however, that your content can sometimes be at the mercy of each platform’s rules and guidelines. With Youtube, there are a couple common reasons why your video could be restricted from playing in the app. The good news is that once you troubleshoot the issue, you can make the necessary changes and get your video to play in the app!

 

1. You don’t have embedding enabled on your video.

 

The Tithe.ly Church App requires a video to have embedding enabled in order to play. Ensure your video has embedding enabled by going to your Youtube account, clicking on your avatar, then click the Creator Studio link. Open the Video Manager, then for any given video click the Edit dropdown menu, and go to Info & Settings. On the Advanced Settings tab, under Distribution Options make sure that the Allow Embedding box is clicked. If this box was previously unchecked, checking it may solve your problem!

 

2. Youtube has disabled embedding on your video.

 

Sometimes Youtube’s algorithms will detect something in your video and disable the ability to embed. This most often happens due to the presence of copyrighted material in the video, such as music. A handy clue that this is the issue is that the description of the video will often show the copyrighted music like in the screenshot below.

Note that this copyright info doesn’t necessarily appear in every single instance of Youtube flagging your video for copyright. Even if it doesn't appear in your video description, consider if you are using any music at all in your video that could be the cause of embedding being disabled. If you are using copyrighted material, it will need to be removed from the video in order for embedding to become enabled again.

 

Those 2 issues cause the vast majority of problems with Youtube videos in the Tithe.ly Church App. Hopefully now your congregation can view all the awesome things God is doing through your videos!