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Troubleshooting Access Denied Errors as an instructor/media owner

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7.0 - Last modified on 2025-11-25 Revised by Judith Stern

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5.0 - Last modified on 2025-06-23 Revised by Sara Viray

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2.0 - Last modified on 2022-11-01 Revised by Sara Viray

1.0 - Created on 2022-10-24 Authored by Sara Viray

If students/viewers have been reporting Access Denied Errors on your Kaltura media (which may or may not occur for you when you go to view the content yourself), please try the following checks to resolve the error.

Check if you sent your viewers a KAF link

If you gave your students a link that started with "https://kaf.berkeley.edu/media", the link will not work reliably because of campus-wide privacy settings.

Please see How do I provide a link to a Kaltura media item in bCourses? for alternative methods of sharing a link to Kaltura media. 

Check if you have expired availability dates on your videos

Check if the video has availability dates. Availability dates on a video apply to all Media Galleries that it has been published in, as well as all places it has been embedded.

  1. Navigate to My Media (either in the global navigation (vertical navigation bar on the left) of bCourses or MediaSpace)
  2. Find the video you are trying to troubleshoot and select the video title.
  3. Scroll down to check if your video contains a "Available to View" section above the Details tab.
  4. If your video has that section, it has availability dates above the Details tab.

    Screenshot of a recording that has availability dates that has an "Available to View" section above the Details tab.

If you want to change or remove these availability dates, please follow the instructions in How do I restrict viewing of Kaltura videos to a specific time frame?

Check your Course Site Visibility and User Enrollment

If the course is Public or Institution, check if the person having the error can be found in the "People" tab.

Non-intuitively, anyone not in the People tab will not have access to Kaltura videos due to privacy settings. 

You have two options to add People tab of the course site.

Try reindexing the media

"Access Denied" appears when Kaltura media becomes improperly indexed (so the system doesn't properly identify the viewer as someone who is supposed to be able to access it). It's a known Kaltura issue, and happens only occasionally. When it does happen, it's fairly easy to fix. See How to fix common Kaltura publishing/access issues by reindexing.

Still no luck?

If none of these checks fix the problem, please email kalturahelp@berkeley.edu for assistance.