Top 7 Secure Video Streaming Methods
Video is crucial for any business with an online presence. You can use video for various purposes, including marketing, promotional, and educational content. As with any digital asset, online videos are vulnerable to security issues, hacking, and piracy. Using a secure video streaming platform to host your videos is important.
Research by Digital TV Research has shown that digital piracy can cost businesses $52 billion a year. This is largely due to a rise in hacking, among other digital attacks on content. It is estimated that the cost of cybercrime could reach $10.5 trillion annually by 2025.
The rise in digital piracy is why working with a secure video platform is so important to create a secure video environment for your business video content.
In this post, we’ll focus on secure video hosting and delivery. Specifically, we’ll examine seven important business video hosting methods, tools, and features. As a professional broadcaster, you should look for video hosting services that include all the features we list here and more.
You will learn about secure video streaming methods and platforms for your business.
Top 7 Secure Video Streaming Methods
Not every secure video delivery method is created equal. The measures you use will depend on the purpose of your content, your target audience, and your goal with broadcasting.
For example, you wouldn’t put a password on video content that you’re trying to spread to the masses, but you would likely use another security method to make sure that the video player and sensitive information are not compromised in any way.
However, if you were sharing an internal training video, you would use a password to protect the content.
There are multiple methods to establish secure streaming.
Let’s dive into seven of the top secure streaming and private video sharing methods for professional broadcasting.
3. SSL/TLS Encrypted Paywall
Whenever customers enter payment information into your website, you need to ensure their data security. Otherwise, you could be liable for their damages and face major issues.
The best way to do this is via SSL/TLS. In fact, this is the same type of encryption that banks use to protect your financial data.
A secure video paywall ensures that you are protecting your customers’ data at all times. Therefore, it’s essential to use a secure paywall protected by SSL/TLS if you choose to monetize your video content.
Ideally, any paywall should also allow you to monetize video content and accept payment via multiple currencies and accept cards, PayPal, etc. When asking viewers for payment, you need to ensure you keep them safe.
4. Password-Protected Video
Although it seems simple, password-protected live streaming is a great way to protect your content from unqualified viewers.
Password-protected video works just like you would imagine. First, you set a password on the videos of your choice. Then viewers have to enter the correct password to watch. They can’t access the video if they don’t know the password.
Password protection is a simple, effective security method, one that’s perfect for preview videos, internal company use, client reviews, etc.
It’s also important to keep in mind that this is not an end-all-be-all line of defense. Depending on the scale of your brand, passwords may be leaked in online forums. For this reason, many broadcasters change passwords from time to time to keep forbidden access under wraps.
Password-protected video streaming is an effective way to help keep your content secure, especially when combined with other security features.
5. Geographic (IP) Restrictions
If your viewers are located within specific regions or countries, geographic or IP restrictions may be an option for you.
This tool aims to combat piracy by blocking certain geographic regions from accessing your videos. Most piracy comes from certain regions. In fact, the United States Office of the Trade Representative lists 36 countries that have the highest rate of piracy. Geo-restrictions make it easy to “blacklist” these countries. That does mean cutting off access for all viewers from those countries though.
Many businesses only want to target their videos to viewers in one or two countries. In that case, geographic restrictions make it easy to “whitelist” these countries, automatically blacklisting everything else.
The whitelist works using IP addresses, which correspond to geographic location. Like most security measures, it’s not 100% bulletproof, but it can provide a valuable additional layer of security. If you know your target audience is located in a specific country, this can be a streaming security method you consider using.
6. Referrer Restrictions
Geo-restrictions work well, but as we’ve covered, the best way to ensure encrypted video streaming is through layers of security.
Another method you can implement to keep your content protected is referrer restrictions.
Referrer restrictions function by whitelisting certain domains that your video content is allowed to play on. Typically, these domains include your website and any partner websites you may have.
When enabled, this feature checks with the server regularly through a system of digital security tokens.
When it’s detected that your video is embedded on an unauthorized site, it will be immediately blocked from playback. Anyone who tries to embed your video on a different website will be unable to stream it.
7. Secure Video Data Centers and CDN
When you upload an online video to an online video platform, those files are stored in a data center, often run by a content delivery network (CDN ).
ACDN is a network of servers that uses complex load-balancing software to deliver video and other media globally as fast as possible. A live streaming CDN ensures your content loads quickly with minimal lagging and buffering.
Using an online video platform integrated with a CDN helps protect you against various attacks. This includes “DDoS” attacks, which flood a website with traffic to attempt to crash it. Using a CDN makes this type of cybersecurity attack largely ineffective.
Plus, CDNs help to protect you against hardware failure. They offer built-in redundancy, making your content safe and fast to load.
Additional Secure Streaming Tips
These seven security measures are quite effective. We’d like to reiterate that using multiple lines of defense is the way to go.
A general tip for secure streaming is to regularly monitor your systems. Stay on the watch for suspicious activity.
As we briefly mentioned before, a quick Google search of “your brand name + video title + password” should bring up any forums or websites that have leaked the credentials of password-protected content. This will let you know if you need to change any passwords.
Secure streaming is important, but so is the sensitive information that comes with professional broadcasting. If you monetize your content, your video CMS dashboard is associated with your financial information.
When you use video content for sales and marketing, you likely collect email addresses and contact information. You owe it to your leads to keep their information safe.
If possible, enable multi-factor authentication on any accounts that you use for professional broadcasting. This goes for your online video platform, your software encoder, the email address associated with your account, and any other tools you use.
Conclusion
We’ve covered seven of the top tools and methods and secure video streaming platforms. Of course, there are other ways to keep your online video content safe.
For example, many professionals create custom apps, video portals, and solutions for their businesses. Others integrate SSO and plug video functionality into an existing backend system.
No matter which security measures you’ll use, businesses aspiring to this sort of video success will need a professional video platform with API access such as Mslive.
The Mslive online video platform offers all the security features we’ve discussed in this article. Our content is delivered by industry-leading CDNs. Also, we offer a range of professional services for businesses that need more assistance in getting started.
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