Securing your videos
Last updated on Dec. 27, 2009
Bits on the Run offers a number of features for discouraging theft of your content. We do not guarantee 100% security (that's impossible), but do offer far better protection than any regular webserver.
Security settings
First and foremost, it is possible to restrict access to your content through two settings in the account page of the CMS: video downloads and player embeds.
With the video downloads option, you can enable/disable the direct download links to your videos. When disabled, the only way to access your videos is through your players. Even external videoplayers will not be able to access your content!
The player embeds option allows you to restrict the domains in which your players can be embedded. For example, you could set that players can only be embedded from www.yourdomain.com. If a user copy/pastes an embed code to another website, the player will not be loaded there.
Watermarking
Another feature we offer is watermarking. Though it won't make your videos more secure, burning a watermark into them will discourage theft and leeching (unauthorized streaming) of your content on other websites. Everybody can clearly see you are the original owner of this content.
A watermark can be set for every transcoding template, in the account page of the CMS. Since you can have multiple templates, it is possible to generate multiple watermarked versions of a video, or make the watermark bigger for larger conversions.
A watermark is usually a PNG image, since PNG supports transparency (JPG and GIF work too). This makes the watermark blend nicely into the video. The PNG is placed on top of the video and then transcoded into the videostream of the conversion. Both the position of the watermark and its margin to the edge of the video can be set.
RTMPE
By default, all videos from Bits on the Run are streamed over HTTP. Certain video download tools and extensions are able to sniff the URL of your videos and offer the user a download option.
In order to prevent this, we can serve your videos over RTMPE, an encrypted streaming protocol from Adobe. There are important cons to RTMP streaming though, which you should be aware of. You can contact us if you still want to switch your account to RTMPE.
Implicit features
Next to above features, which you can control in the account panel of the CMS, we have several implicit (always enabled) security mechanisms. For example, any direct link to a video on our CDN's is only valid for a short time. Should somebody be able to sniff a direct link to one of your conversions, this link will be invalid an hour later.
