Video: Can Live Streams Be Secured?
How do you keep live streams beyond the paywall using traditional DRM and other commonly used methods? Even when the focus is on maintainid the paid-content integrity of live streams (as opposed to VOD versions posted after the event), it's a constant challenge for companies delivering live events online given the many viable workarounds to typical security measures, as TourGigs' Casey Charvet and Right Brain Media's Deke Hooper explain in this excerpt from their panel at Live Streaming Summit.
Learn more about streaming security at Streaming Media West.
Read the transcript of this clip:
Casey Charvet, TourGigs: We absolutely have to secure these. They are pay streams and anything that causes a loss in sales is something that is not really acceptable. We have to manage this more from a policy standpoint and traditional DRM doesn't really help us out on this. As you see, somebody can just point their phone at a screen and there's no DRM that I know of that will prevent that.
Deke Hooper, Right Brain Media: Security is a questionable thing altogether. If they say that's where their money comes from, then they need to make sure that they've ensured certain levels of measurement. On the internet, it will be re-streamed. Geo-blocking is fluff. Just get a DNS from another location. DNScodes.com. VPNs ... If that is where their monetization is coming from, that will be my first question to them. Maybe they should look at pay-up-front or subscription. Netflix does well. The content can be stolen, but it's really the people who produce the content in that scenario that probably care more about it. Not necessarily the person that's putting it out there.
You tend to try to find out why they need the content secured, and what's their logic behind securing the content. We want it secured. Why not put it on just not the average, everyday person but any average hacker, anybody that's done a YouTube stream or they play a video game, open up a website, that's open source software you get and you just share your screen with anybody. It's not rocket science for anybody to do it.
We try to encourage the clients to ensure that their profit model comes from either ads or some kind of other payment. Something else needs to be put in place. Securing is that nice thing that we tell people, but at the end of the day, it can't really be truly secured.
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