Video posts – “Media is not available”

Hi Markus, videos should in fact all work, yes, so long as there aren’t issues from Instagram’s end. For example, if there is any copyright claim on the audio used in a video, Instagram may block it from being embedded via their API, which is what Spotlight does.

Have you tried clearing the cache for that specific feed as explained here? If that doesn’t fix the issue, it may be due to a limitation placed on those specific videos by Instagram itself, which unfortunately, we won’t have any control over ourselves.

Hi Mark,

Thanks for explaining – I had no idea that there are copyright topics involved as well. I can’t know for sure, but this might explain it. It’s not my own instagram post but the client’s stream – I can’t know of course how they create their video posts – but it definitely contains music that is well known, so that could be it.

There won’t be an actual solution it seems, except for telling the client to not use those kind of music for their video posts (which just won’t work in real life, as they just use any app on the phone I assume to create those video posts)

Thanks for giving that valuable insight

Markus

You’re welcome, Markus.

You can also find this information posted in Instagram’s documentation: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/reference/ig-media/

It’s under Fields > media_url. As you can see, if there is copyrighted material used in a post, the API won’t provide the media file’s URL, so Spotlight cannot display it locally on your client’s website.

I see it in the link/dev documentation – it particularly states the “audio” that is added to reels and might come with copyright issues

To clarify – it does show the preview images, but it won’t show the actual video when clicking on it to open it in the lightbox, correct?

That’s correct. We implemented a solution to bring in the preview image rather than showing a blank media file, but the actual video cannot be imported.