Possible Ways To Protect Your Streaming Video Content

There is no denying to fact that so far we don’t have any way to completely prevent online videos from being taken away by unwanted parties. We have video pirates, intruders, hackers, etc. who can take our protected videos within no time. Believe me, if videos can be viewed on a personal device, it can be stolen too. The only way is to be on the safer side is by making it tougher for the thieves to access them so that the frequency of videos to be stolen can be minimized. We have two options in front of us, firstly accept it and get used to the stealing or secondly accept the challenge and implement some effective security features to make it harder and harder for the thieves.

Let’s study how can we reduce accessibility for the thieves to steal our media. But, it depends on various options depending on the way the video is presented.

Progressive Download Files

The transfer of media file from server to a client is termed as Progressive Download. We miss out protection via Progressive Download, if in case to play a media file you are using an embedded media player such as QuickTime or Windows Media player. The user can access the file directly by looking at the HTML code. By HTML code can be used to determine the location of the video file.

Few quick steps to make it tough for thief in Progressive Download:

1. You can play around the JavaScript file by keeping the embedding code in an external JS file. By doing so, you are placing the file’s location little far from the HTML. It is still easy to locate.

2. You can also obfuscate JS code so that thief finds it difficult to locate the file location. Write in such a way that to locate the file, thief would need advanced JavaScript knowledge.

3. Flash Video is the best option to save our video content. This way you can create a SWF file as the video player and have the video file location hidden inside the SWF file.

You can play hard to protect your content but in progressive download, all video content has one major issue i.e. the file is always downloaded to the viewer’s machine. This makes it easier for thief as all they have to do is to find the file location on the hard drive. That’s the reason it is said that this method is inherently open to theft.

Streaming Video Files

Streaming server give an option to do real-time protection. The advantage in Streaming video files over Progressive download is that the file is not actually downloaded to the viewer’s machine. The user views only as a real-time stream so so file is left on the user’s drive.

In streaming video, only the thief with some technical understanding or with strong determination can try and steal the video content. We can think of two approach by which our streamed video content can be stolen.

1. This one is the most common way i.e. uses a video stream capture tool. By this app, video stream is captured and saved as a file. Such theft is quite tough to guard against. The only option we are left to guard against this theft by using some defences i.e. deny access to known capture utilities.

2. If not stream capture then there is option of using screen capture utility. This application captures whatever is displayed on screen. A certain area or window on the machine is defined, let the video play and tell the utility to capture it.

By now, you must have noticed that there is no foolproof way which can safeguard our media content. Although it's a very uncommon way to steal video, it's a good illustration of the fact that thieves always have one more option than the webmaster.