How to Protect Your OTT Content While Streaming

OTT streaming has risen in popularity and generates tons of revenue for content owners and businesses. But, it always existed alongside piracy, which finds new ways to access streamed content. Therefore, it is important to implement the latest technology in secure video hosting and streaming. 

There are many parts to ensuring security for video streaming. The network must be secure, while the data must be stored in secure servers, and the content needs to be streamed without any unethical copying by pirates pretending to be customers. The user account security also has to be maintained.

Maintaining the security of the stream is essential to protect your revenue. Developing a great content library can be expensive and if pirates steal your content and publish it elsewhere, you effectively end up paying people to watch it there. If they embed your videos elsewhere, it may also lower the streaming quality by overloading the servers with unauthorized usage. Therefore, you should use all the latest security technology and invest in protecting your intellectual property too.

Secured OTT Streaming Methods

There are various methods to secure OTT streaming. The best practice is to ensure that all the right ones are added to your OTT platform.

AES Encryption

Advanced Encryption Standard or AES protects video when they are being transmitted or in paused state. It is defined as a US-government standardized symmetric block cipher that can be used to encrypt sensitive data held in any software or hardware material and process. The encryption is end-user controlled using a special key that needs to be held by the viewer to decrypt and view the video. This makes it harder for hackers to reach the content.

HTTPS Delivery

Ever had security tips like ensuring that you’re on websites with HTTPS in the URL? It’s to protect from unauthorized third parties wanting to access your web session on a site. HTTPS delivery uses HLS encryption through several security certificates and keys like SSL and TSL, to prevent hack attacks especially when people are on open networks. It ensures that the OTT platform stream metadata and transaction information are securely sent in encrypted channels between server to end-user.

SSL/TLS Encrypted Paywall

The favorite activity of financial frauds the world over are looking for vulnerabilities in payment gateways to exploit. Therefore, a basic requirement of the OTT app is a secure payment gateway. A secure pay wall using SSL/TLS encryption is needed to secure the bank transactions and monetize the video content. Also, add DPI that is deep packet inspection to further secure the SSL/TSL encryption.

Password-Protected Video

This is a basic step to keep your videos secure. Especially if your content management system provides access to clients to upload their videos or there are many stakeholders, it becomes vital to keep track of password protection from all levels. Of course, users also require password protection. It’s a great idea for live streaming videos to prevent revenue loss.

Geographic (IP) Restrictions

Sometimes you may want to restrict some catalogs to certain locations or have streaming rights only in some geography. You can also use IP restrictions to prevent access from high piracy destinations. However, this is not a foolproof security measure in a secure streaming platform and can be bypassed. Yet, it is useful to have and helps comply with copyright restrictions.

Referrer Restrictions

This set of security standards can prevent your videos from being embedded into unauthorized websites. It lets you white list the domains where your content is allowed to be hosted. This measure mediates through security tokens and blocks the video from going anywhere the security token is non-existent. This is particularly important if you have pay walled content. It is not foolproof but enough to prevent most pirates from getting to the content.

Secure Video Data Center and CDN

The uploaded video content is usually stored in a secure data center that is part of a content delivery network. CDNs protect your website from various attacks like DDoS used to cause a crash. They also help with hardware failures, quickening the loading speed of your content. Using a good CDN when live streaming ensures that the content is loading fast and playing seamlessly.

Conclusion

If you’re developing your OTT provider app in-house, you will need to pay special attention to implementing the security features discussed above. It can work out to be quite expensive despite being very necessary to protect video content. One budget-friendly option to get secure streaming services is opting for a white-label OTT streaming platform. It saves you the hassle of adding security methods by just offering you the option of incorporating the best ones.