Why Is Video Encryption Important For Your Media Or Elearning Platform?

Have you noticed how in recent years there has been a rapid increase in the number of OTT platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney plus and so much more? It’s the same with e-learning video platforms such as Khan Academy, Coursera, etc. Almost everyone relies on these platforms to view content.

These media platforms rely on their premium content to generate revenue. But with the rise in piracy in recent years has seen users accessing the content for free without spending any dime. They end up losing a vast chunk of revenue due to this.

Every year organizations lose billions of dollars in piracy. Almost all the content is freely available in different sources. Users can access video content for free without having to spend much money on it.

This is where video encryption comes in. Video Encryptions stop any unauthorized access to your video content and curbs piracy to a substantial extent. In this blog, I’ll shed some light on video encryption and how organizations are using it for video protection, in order to stop their content from being pirated.

What Is Video Encryption?

As you might already know, encryption refers to the process where a certain file or message is encoded so that it seems gibberish and can only be accessed with the help of an encryption key.

Similarly, video encryption is the process of encoding your video so that it can not be accessed by anyone without the encryption key. This stops any unwanted view or even download of the video. This puts a stop to any unwanted view or even download of your videos.

The videos are encrypted with the help of encoding software and hardware to protect the video content. When a user tries to access the encrypted video, they will get an encrypted file playing via a video player on their website or app.

In order to know more about video encryption, you can check out our blog on encrypted video streaming.

Video Encryption Techniques

There are different video encryption techniques available, which can be used for video protection. The major video encryption technologies being used can be further classified on the basis that if the video is live or pre-recorded:

Pre-recorded videos can be encrypted by:

• HLS with AES-128 commonly termed as HLS-E
• AES -128 and Sample AES- 128 Encryption
• DRM based encryption- Widevine DRM, Fairplay DRM, Playready DRM, etc.

Live videos can be encrypted with the help of the following video encryption technology:

• RTMFP and RTMP(E)
• HTML5 DRM standard

What To Keep In Mind Before Switching To A Video Encryption Standard ?

Your user might be using different devices and not all encryption methods work with all the technology. So to tackle this you would need different video encryption methods for video protection.

While encrypting your videos you need to keep in your mind that technology keeps evolving. The encryption method which you might be using today can in turn become obsolete in some time. This is why you would have to eventually re-encode your content. As the content might become defunct and unreadable in the future as the encryption technology becomes obsolete. Encoding a video that has been already encrypted can be tough. This is why it is advised that you keep the raw file of video for future use.

How Are Online Videos Protected?

Without going into the technicalities of it, I’ll give you a brief overview of how video protection happens with the help of video encryption.

The video is first encoded into standard encryption. After that, the video is stored in a server, which makes the video more secure. Also, you can enable password protection and a user would need valid credentials to access the video.

When a valid user accesses the video through their browser, the video gets decrypted. Since the video is password protected on an external server, no unauthorized views can happen via other software and thus it can not be recorded.

The browser also does not allow the OS to store the content on the viewer’s computer. The secure connection is terminated soon after viewing is complete. For targeted marketing and statistical research, the data from the viewer is passed on to the content provider. With this data, you can also track down pilferages and leakages. And, if by chance the video is downloaded, then the encryption makes sure that it does not play on the available media player.

How Does Video Encryption Stop Piracy?

Due to the encryption of the video content a user would need expertise on it in order to decrypt it. A standard user would not be able to access the content. Even if the pirate is good he’d have to pay for the login access in order to get access to the video.

The pirate has to encode the encrypted stream with the help of a software to get an accessible format. The process will either increase the size of the file or reduce the quality of the source. As the size of the file increases, the pirate needs to spend more to upload the data again. Cloud algorithms can use the uploaded source and match it up to the original stream to find out the correlations.

It’s A Wrap

Having said all that video encryption is just the start of your journey for video protection. Even though it’d be hard to decrypt a video, finding an encryption key to access is much easier and there are certain tools which help in that. This is why organizations are making sure to hide the encryption key with the help of DRM video security.

In order to learn more about elearning video protection and even for OTT platforms you can refer to the blog linked. In the article you’d find in detail how you piracy is done both via credentials sharing and content download. I also explain how you can curb both the types of piracy. That was all for now! I hope you liked the article, feel free to share this article with your peers.