DRM on every paid plan
api.video’s pricing page lists private videos with one-time tokens and AES-128 encryption. Widevine and FairPlay are not on it. Kinescope includes both on every paid plan from €10 a month.
Kinescope vs api.video:
the video API with DRM included
api.video bills by the minute and protects video with private tokens and AES-128 encryption; Widevine and FairPlay are not on its pricing page. Kinescope gives developers a REST API, webhooks, an MCP server and open-source player SDKs, with Widevine, FairPlay and per-viewer watermarks included from €10 a month.
Key differentiators
Domain restrictions included
On pay-as-you-go, api.video charges $20 a month to limit playback to your domains. Kinescope includes domain restrictions and signed links in every paid plan.
Watermarks per viewer
api.video adds a logo or text to mark ownership. Kinescope adds a dynamic watermark with the viewer’s e-mail or ID, so a leaked copy points to the account it came from.
Billed per GB
api.video bills by the minute: encoding is free, storage starts at $0.00285 and delivery at $0.0017 per minute, at any quality. Kinescope bills delivery from €0.03/GB down to €0.01/GB with volume, plus €0.01 per minute of processing, charged once on upload.
A free plan for real videos
api.video’s free sandbox limits videos to 30 seconds, adds the api.video logo and deletes them after 24 hours. Kinescope’s free plan stores 100 minutes of video with 200 GB of traffic a month, and needs no card.
An uptime target you can see
api.video lists no SLA for pay-as-you-go; SLAs come with its Enterprise plan. Kinescope targets 99.98% monthly uptime, with a financial SLA on the Mega plan.
Comparison at a glance
Pricing model
Per GB: delivery from €0.03/GB, processing €0.01/min once
Per minute: free encoding, storage from $0.00285/min, delivery from $0.0017/min
DRM (Widevine + FairPlay)
Included from €10/month
Not on the pricing page; private tokens and AES-128
Domain restrictions
Included
$20/month on pay-as-you-go
Watermarking
Dynamic, per viewer
Logo or text
Player SDKs
iOS, Android, Flutter, React Native, React, Vue, Angular
Web, React, React Native, Flutter, Swift, Android
Live latency
5–10 s over RTMP
About 3 s in good conditions
Free plan
100 min stored + 200 GB/month, no card
Sandbox: 30-second videos, deleted after 24 h
Uptime SLA
99.98% target, financial SLA on Mega
None on pay-as-you-go; SLA on Enterprise
Where data lives
EU data centres by default (Dutch company)
Hosting region per project on Enterprise
Moving off api.video? Our team brings the library across
We bring your videos over at no cost on the Super and Mega plans. Your old embeds stay live until the Kinescope embeds are tested, so nothing goes dark. Hands-on EN/PT support throughout.
When to choose
Choose Kinescope if you need:
Widevine and FairPlay DRM, per-viewer watermarks, domain restrictions with no add-on fee, a free plan for full-length videos, a video library your editors can use, data in the EU by default and a team that migrates you.
Choose api.video if you need:
Live at about 3 seconds in good conditions, simulcasting to YouTube, Facebook, Twitch and Vimeo, free encoding with one per-minute price at any quality, or AI transcription in 33 languages.
Meet Kinescope: a video API with the platform included
DRM from day one
Widevine and FairPlay on every paid plan from €10 a month — no add-on fee and no per-license charge — plus dynamic per-viewer watermarking, signed links and domain restrictions.
API, SDKs and MCP
A REST API, 7 webhook event types, open-source SDKs for iOS, Android, Flutter, React, React Native, Vue and Angular, and an MCP server that lets AI agents search and edit videos and manage live streams.
Our own CDN
Our own infrastructure, not resold AWS or Cloudflare, covering Latin America, the US, Europe and the CIS, with a 99.98% monthly uptime target.
Live streaming
Go live over RTMP or RTMPS from OBS, vMix, Zoom or a hardware encoder, keep an automatic recording, and let live-stream webhooks tell your backend when the encoder connects.
A video library for the whole team
Editors upload, organise and publish in the dashboard — projects, folders, playlists, player templates, AI subtitles and chapters — while your code works with the same videos over the API.
One predictable price
Plans from €10 a month with pay-as-you-go usage: delivery from €0.03/GB down to €0.01/GB, storage from €0.03/GB, processing €0.01 per minute once. No per-seat fees and no annual contract.
They left Vimeo, Kaltura and Mux
Every number is what they saved against the platform they left.
16 TBmoved off Kaltura in about two weeksWith Kinescope we get a convenient API, a human touch, stable performance, and fair prices. We worked out the cost up front, and on our volumes it came out about 8× cheaper than Kaltura
Denis Korovkin, LMS team lead
−75%off the video hosting bill after Vimeo
5×lower video costs than on Vimeo
€10,000+a year saved against Vimeo’s quoteVimeo suddenly told us we had to pay 20× more. With Kinescope we save at least €10,000 a year — and get more stability for free…
Mathijs de Ruiter, Co-founder
−60%off the video hosting bill after MuxKinescope’s affordable, scalable, and accessible video solution has been a game-changer, empowering us to deliver world-class education…
Eriky Kunitake, Head of Business & Operations
9M+children reached by the films…reinvest our resources into other matters, like the direct work with children in our shelter…
Ysrael C. Diloy, Child Protection Specialist
Try Kinescope free — 100 minutes + 200 GB/month, no card required
FAQ
Can’t find the answer you need? Check out our Help Center.
api.video’s pricing page lists private videos with one-time tokens and AES-128 encryption; Widevine and FairPlay are not on it (api.video, November 2026). Tokens control who gets a playable link, while DRM encrypts the stream so only a licensed player can decode it. Kinescope includes Widevine and FairPlay on every paid plan from €10 a month — see DRM video hosting.
Encoding is free. Storage starts at $0.00285 per minute of video stored and delivery at $0.0017 per minute delivered, at the same price for any quality. Domain restrictions cost $20 a month on pay-as-you-go, custom domains start at $60 a month, and keeping analytics longer than a month starts at $12 a month; Enterprise is priced on request (api.video, November 2026). Kinescope bills delivery from €0.03/GB down to €0.01/GB, storage from €0.03/GB and €0.01 per minute of processing, once, on plans from €10 a month — see pricing.
api.video has a free sandbox for testing: videos are limited to 30 seconds, carry the api.video logo and are deleted after 24 hours (api.video, November 2026). Kinescope’s free plan stores up to 100 minutes of video with 200 GB of traffic a month and needs no card.
Yes. Our team brings your videos over at no cost on the Super and Mega plans, and your old embeds stay live until the Kinescope embeds are tested. Support is hands-on, in English and Portuguese.
Yes. Kinescope MCP Server runs at
https://api.kinescope.io/mcp in public beta and works with Cursor, Claude Desktop, Claude Code and other MCP clients. With your API token, an agent can search and edit videos, organise projects and playlists, pull analytics and manage live streams; delete operations are disabled. Setup is in the developer hub.If you need live video at about 3 seconds of latency in good conditions, simulcasting to YouTube, Facebook, Twitch and Vimeo, free encoding with one per-minute price at any quality, or AI transcription in 33 languages. Kinescope fits teams that want Widevine and FairPlay, per-viewer watermarks and domain restrictions without add-on fees, a video library for editors and data in the EU by default.