Trying to secure our streaming media from beiing downloaded

Question

We have build a website for a client that is providing streaming video content for members. What we are facing right now is that our movies are getting downloaded. We know that we can't block off screen capture, but at the moment it seems people are downloading instead of screen capturing.

We recently started using an external service to prevent this calles Vzaar who offers AES encrypted streams which is decoded by the player itself. So no videos are stored on our own server anymore.

But even now it seems that they are still able to download movies even now. Does anyone have an effective way to prevent this? Is maybe Google Widevine the solution?

If netflix is able to prevent the majority of downloads it can be done i thing. Maybe Google Widevine is an answer? We have used up our ideas so hopefully you can help us.

Greets Stijn

Answer 1

Any DRM solution really should help, most popular are Widevine (from Google), Fairplay (from Apple) and Playready (from Microsoft). Natively each of them support a different array of clients, e.g. widevine is supported by android, chrome and firefox. The issue isn't only encrypting the video, that can be done with HLS-AES but then you have to figure out how to pass the decryption key, in HLS-AES it is up to you and will probably somehow be visible to the end-user so they can download the encrypted movie, download the decryption key and that's it, with DRM the decryption key is set inside a "license" which only the browser internally should be able to see. I will also add that some DRM schemes also block screen capturing like Playready does (but only works on IE/Edge) and Widevine does on android devices.

Answer 2

Widevine DRM is the best you can do right now. That doesn't prevent people from getting your media though... there are always ways around this.