diff --git a/js/components/ascribe_detail/media_container.js b/js/components/ascribe_detail/media_container.js
index cb86e558..00ca9164 100644
--- a/js/components/ascribe_detail/media_container.js
+++ b/js/components/ascribe_detail/media_container.js
@@ -65,7 +65,16 @@ let MediaContainer = React.createClass({
         // We also force uniqueness of usernames, so this check is safe to dtermine if the
         // content was registered by the current user.
         const didUserRegisterContent = currentUser && (currentUser.username === content.user_registered);
-        const fileExtension = extractFileExtensionFromString(content.digital_work.url);
+
+        // We want to show the file's extension as a label of the download button.
+        // We can however not only use `extractFileExtensionFromString` on the url for that
+        // as files might be saved on S3 without a file extension which leads
+        // `extractFileExtensionFromString` to extract everything starting from the top level
+        // domain: e.g. '.net/live/<hash>'.
+        // Therefore, we extract the file's name (last part of url, separated with a slash)
+        // and try to extract the file extension from there.
+        const fileName = content.digital_work.url.split('/').pop();
+        const fileExtension = extractFileExtensionFromString(fileName);
 
         let thumbnail = content.thumbnail.thumbnail_sizes && content.thumbnail.thumbnail_sizes['600x600'] ?
             content.thumbnail.thumbnail_sizes['600x600'] : content.thumbnail.url_safe;
@@ -123,7 +132,11 @@ let MediaContainer = React.createClass({
                             className="ascribe-margin-1px"
                             href={content.digital_work.url}
                             target="_blank">
-                            {getLangText('Download')} .{fileExtension} <Glyphicon glyph="cloud-download"/>
+                            {/*
+                                If it turns out that `fileExtension` is an empty string, we're just
+                                using the label 'file'.
+                            */}
+                            {getLangText('Download')} .{fileExtension || 'file'} <Glyphicon glyph="cloud-download"/>
                         </Button>
                     </AclProxy>
                     {embed}