Hosting and Serving Assets

Assets rendered by the Editing API are automatically sent to the Shotstack hosting and CDN service, a permanent hosting service, which is provided by default to all customers. You can serve them to your users straight from their CDN URL. You do not need to download them or copy them to your own storage.

The CDN URL is built from the render status response, so you do not need another API call to get it:

https://cdn.shotstack.io/au/{{STAGE}}/{{OWNER_ID}}/{{RENDER_ID}}.{{FORMAT}}

Where STAGE is stage for the sandbox or v1 for production, OWNER_ID is the owner value in the render status response, RENDER_ID is the render id and FORMAT is the output format, for example mp4, gif or jpg. For example:

https://cdn.shotstack.io/au/v1/5ca6hu7s9k/d2b46ed6-998a-4d6b-9d91-b8cf0193a655.mp4

It can take a few seconds after the render status is done for the file to arrive on the CDN. The Serve API is optional: use it, or a webhook, if you need to confirm the file has arrived, look up its size or delete it.

The url in the render status response is different. It is a temporary link that expires after 24 hours, so do not serve it to your users. See Temporary Output Files.

Files uploaded and ingested via the Ingest API are stored for use in an edit and are not suited for streaming or serving to customers.

Shotstack hosting is one of several built in integrations called Destinations. If you want to send files to your own storage instead, you can use one of the other destinations or opt out of Shotstack hosting.