Protecting HTML5 video

Question

I shall explain my situation as best I can so you can see where i'm coming from. I'm working on a wordpress site for a sports team, there are loads of teams. We want to put coaching sessions on our site. This is so that all the coaches can see how the sessions should be done as many are parent coaches.

The problem is that there are a lot of coaches, in a very tight knit community, often families have kids in rival teams for other districts, so what we want to do is protect our material from either; just being downloaded by our coaches and shared with opposition coaches, or people who shouldn't have access to it in the first place, or people acquiring links to the videos and just accessing the videos themselves and possibly distributing them. There is a lot of movement with players and coaches between local teams. We need to maintain that all the work we are doing stays solely within our club and not allow somebody to leave and takes hours worth of footage and training sessions to a rival club.

All the coaching sessions are in private pages, I did start using youtube unlisted videos to stream the videos in, but this is insecure as you can just get the link from the source code and distribute it.

I'm now using HTML5 secure video player plugin, my videos are in a folder outside my document root, but it appears I can just right click the video and download it when it's playing in Chrome. This is obviously a problem too.

I saw using a CDN may avoid this too, I have got a cloudflare account - I'm a little lost really with how to protect these videos. This is my first real venture with video.

Does anybody have any advice in how to protect local HTML5 videos.

Answer 1

First:

You will need a plugin that acts as an intermediary for your cloud storage. Cloud storage innately (if setup properly) will protect your files. I have used the CDN Vault plugin and it works great. It's a premium plugin that depends on Amazon S3 storage. It does some really great obfuscation and encryption so your files aren't easily stolen.

Second:

You should setup membership functionality to restrict your content to members only if you're worried about stolen content. There are quite a few great membership plugins that allow you offer paid/free content to different levels all at once or slow-drip.

Use Case

CDN Vault worked great for a video tutorial subscription service I setup on WordPress for a client. They never had an issue with stolen content. We used the Wishlist membership plugin as well for restricting content to membership levels.

Resources

Check out the following sites to get you started. You will need to choose what feels best for your use case.

• http://www.cdnvault.com/
• http://s3flowshield.com/
• http://member.wishlistproducts.com/
• http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/membership

Hope this helps you!

Answer 2

I am having the same problems as yourself.. I've exhausted many options at the minute .. I've gone down the route of videopress (but this had pitfalls for iOS devices), google drive but there is a high cost per user and you cannot just limit it to a domain.. (but you can limit it to users on a domain.) Rackspace cloud hosting.. but again they cannot limit it to a domain..

The only thing that has worked for me so far is vimeo/pro.. It is a tad expensive at €160 for 50gb but it does what I need..

How did you get on with cdnvault and s3flowshield?

Paul