Live video streaming is getting popular by the day. People live stream their wedding, family events. Corporate live stream product launches, conferences, hackathons. In fact, live streaming applies to all kinds of the event even funeral. But is all that content securely delivered. How to make sure that only the intended audience only visits your site. How to make sure that they do not misuse the video. often these challenges include sound technical knowledge of Internet security. Let me try to put as simple as possible so you get a fair idea about security and privacy of Live video streaming.

Why you need privacy?

An issue of privacy does not apply to all events. Businesses will want events like product launches to go viral and encourage sharing. However, events like Annual general body meeting needs to be secured only to eyes of the board members. Usually, our wedding live streaming customers never bother about privacy. Many feel having a password authenticated page is a hassle. However I distinctly remember one client who asked specifically for a secure page with a password for each viewer. Except for the authorized list, he didn’t want anyone to view the wedding, especially the Income tax guys. I some business situation the privacy policy are so rigid that the live streaming data should travel only through their corporate LAN and not the Internet.

What are the different measures of security?

Watermarking:

A very basic protection against content piracy. Adding a logo or watermark to the video is like stamping the source of origin of content on the video and to some extent, it is difficult to erase.

Authenticated Webpage:

securing a web page using username and password is another straight forward method for protecting access to your content. However, care should be taken that the viewers receive the credentials before the event. An another alternative is to have a common or unique pin no. to each viewer and skip usernames.

Authenticated streams:

Securing a web page actually does not secure a stream. Streams have to separately secure. For example, AWS CloudFront CDN has something called signed URLs. The media content can only be accessed using these temporarily valid URLs. The validity can be set for a session or for a period of time.

Encrypted media:
Additionally encrypting the stream makes it more secure. However, the player also should be capable of decrypting the stream and playing it.

Every layer of security, adds an extra layer of complexity to the media delivery system. Thereby increases the cost of the live video streaming.

But always keep in mind that video cannot be 100% secured. Any viewer with ill intentions can always leak the video. That’s why it is still the single largest threat to the movie industry.