If you’re looking to protect your online video content and YouTube’s private video feature is not secure enough there are a number of different options for video security depending on time, budget and ongoing management.
- Time: How long do you want to spend putting the private video environment together?
- Budget: How much money do you want to spend managing authentication tied to video?
- Management: If you’re building the video viewing environment from scratch (whether it’s a website or application) it has to be managed. And over time, video technology changes and evolves which means it needs to be updated.
The easiest way to secure video is to do it on the page level. Many content management systems (CMS) providers dynamically create pages that are perfect for embedding video. The CMSs have tools and plugins for creating security layers to protect access to video content. WordPress and Drupal are great examples of open source CMSs that have free, easy to use plugins available to protect your video content.
Software designed to work within a corporate authenticated environment such as SharePoint and learning management systems (LMS) provide rich HTML editors enabling the embedding of video into these authenticated experiences. If you have a protected environment currently in place, then this might be your route to securing your video content.
5 Best Online Video Security Best Practices
- Host videos on a premium video platform with basic and advanced player-level security control.
- Make sure the video file can’t be found in the code base. With many video solutions out there, you can right click on the video player and view the page source. Somewhere in that code you’ll find the original video file.
- Keep the video player object from being shared or re-embedded. But what about the video player itself? It’s one thing to protect a file, but you also want to make sure that the player itself cannot be embedded into another website or blog.
- Use solid page-level security with individual users and no shared passwords. Solid page-level security is the combination of the video player and web page.
- Tie your video site into an existing authentication system. You’ll find the most success and adoption around video when users can just get into that environment and access the video content without needing an additional username and password.
