How to protect your videos online

Distributing video securely is a responsible task for every creator, especially in the fields of online corporate training and student e-learning where the content tends to carry sensitive information. Nowadays there are many ways in which you can protect your videos ‒ from sharing a private link to encrypting a video, thus making it harder to get downloaded without authorization.

As we’ve written about it previously, there are different layers of content protection depending on the features your hosting provider offers and the protection they provide.

In this article, we will talk more about the importance of video privacy, different ways to securely share videos online, and tips on keeping your videos protected.

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Why bother about video privacy?

If you have ever taken part in creating video content ‒ especially for educational purposes, you are familiar with the amount of effort that goes into the process. From writing down the ideas, to preparing, filming, editing. High-quality video content takes a lot of time and money to be produced ‒ and if it’s intended for a limited audience only, piracy can be a big problem as it devalues all the effort and minimizes the number of users exclusively using your service to watch these videos.

As we’ve previously discussed, there are some basic ways to protect videos from unauthorized distribution, but they offer only a more basic one-layer protection which you can easily go around. For example, uploading a video on YouTube, Vimeo, or cloud storage like OneDrive or Google Drive, setting the privacy options to “restricted” or even setting the list of accounts that can exclusively get access to the video is enough to restrict access for unauthorized accounts. But what if someone that actually has this access will share the link, record the screen, or download the video?

Unauthorized distribution of online content is a headache for everyone who’s working in the corporate or e-learning field. It’s not only a matter of intellectual property infringement
‒ but it’s also about access to sensitive information that was supposed to be known only by an authorized group of people. And if you’re uploading a paid e-learning course, someone distributing it illegally can be a massive loss of the profit, not to mention copyright issues. These are the main reasons why you need a really good protection for your video content.

The thing is: even if the video hosting provider offers more advanced encryption methods like IP or plugin restrictions, and even some basic streaming encryption, it’s still manageable to go around these and get unapproved distribution to the video, especially for someone with a little more coding experience. Passwords can be stolen, accounts can be taken over ‒ these days, sensitive content requires multiple layers of advanced protection.

And while you can provide legal notice on your website about intellectual rights and the consequences of their violation, it could technically not protect your content from being stolen.

This brings us to the next question.

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How to ensure your videos are well protected

While it’s important to mention that no method will guarantee you 100% protection, some of the options below offer a more complex encryption and make distributing videos unauthorizedly a very difficult task. Our tip here is to ensure a few of these layers of protection for your video e-learning content.

Here are a few layers of video protection starting from more limited protection to more complex encryption:

1. Basic encryption with access restriction - You can easily add the feature of secret link-sharing or access via password ‒ this option ensures your content is received only by the people it’s supposed to. We advise you to choose video hosting that provides at least these measures, or else your content might have a higher chance of being exposed to without authorization. Kinescope offers password and private link protection options:

2. Anti-download and anti-recording plugins - Now, these two options are more serious ‒ for people without some coding knowledge, this can be a preventative method. However, for people who know how to make basic changes to a script, these plugins can be easily avoidable. Still, it won’t hurt to have these measures installed.

3. Geographical restrictions - You can manage the access from different countries and IP addresses, thus preventing your videos from being exposed ‒ this works if you know your audience’s location well. For example, if you’re uploading educational videos for your local company, you can restrict access from other regions and allow only your local region.

4. DRM (digital rights management) system - As we’ve said before, is the golden standard when it comes to the most complex level of video protection.
Kinescope relies on Apple FairPlay and Clear Key technologies to protect videos from unauthorized access, meaning that download (and on Apple devices screen recording and taking a screenshot) is heavily restricted.

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Why should DRM technology be your go-to trusted companion

A digital rights management system (DRM) combines highly protected authorization and anti-download protection. With DRM, the videos are difficult to access and distribute which gives you a peace of mind. A DRM system adds an additional level of protection and unlike other encryption methods - encryption keys cannot be transferred.

A quick reminder on how a DRM works in streaming: there are two levels of encryption - encrypting segments of the video and authorizing users who can unlock the files.

Additionally, some DRM technologies like Apple’s FairPlay restrict screen recording of videos and taking a screenshot‒ every attempt to make a screenshot or a recording is futile as the system won’t allow it. The screenshot returns empty, and the recording just won’t start or starts with a black screen ‒ it’s nearly impossible to overrun this kind of restriction.

And while DRM is really great for securing your e-learning content, we advise you to combine all methods described in this article to get the best protection for your videos.

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Conclusion

Protecting your intellectual video content is an important task every e-learning business faces. To ensure premium protection, it’s best to combine a few encryption methods. Or best - choose a video hosting provider who does that for you and your only task is to upload your videos.

Kinescope uses advanced encryption technologies to make sure your e-learning or corporate content is delivered only to the audience it was supposed to. With Kinescope your videos are protected with private links, passwords and DRM encryption.

We have an advanced content delivery network that makes streaming easier and lighter in many ways, including an intelligent choice of servers. Oh, and all of this at a very affordable price.

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