How to secure HTML5 video

With videos being used everywhere, more and more websites are trying to accommodate videos on their website, if it's for visual tutorials, or marketing. Sometimes though you don't want your video being downloaded and shared with others.. A good case for this would be a subscription based website.

Easy, lets use a flash player.. well ok, we could do.. but with more and more websites jumping over to HTML5 compliant, it would be nice if we could protect our videos and still use the HTML5 player.

The key issues with using an HTML5 player is there is absolutely NO encryption or protection for the videos.

Here's an example of the HTML5 video tag

<video controls>
    <source src="/sample.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
    <source src="/sample.webm" type="video/webm" />
</video>

All a viewer has to do is right click on the playing video and hit a button called 'Save Video As' and they'll have it on their computer. If not they can see exactly where the video is stored and download it anyway.

Protecting the video is a very complex method using multiple checks on multiple technologies, i won't go into the details..

We have spent hours, ounces (of coffee), an unmeasurable amount of stress developing this HTML5 protection.

After a lot of agressive testing we have secured our videos and have developed a very smart detection system which adapts to different download attempts.

And so from the creators of The Skyblue Transporter and The Custom Google +1 button we are proud to announce that we will be releasing Version 1 of our SkyblueVideoProtection (SkyBVP) on a cloud based subscription where you can securely store and stream your videos embedded directly to your website.. For more information please enquire!