I’ve had this concern for quite a few weeks… finally got it licked!
(There’s actually a commercial product that does this for $97, but I’m a cheapskate!)
I use WordPress for my membership sites and use Micro-Membership to take care of the membership aspects (signups, security, content protection, etc.)
One of my membership sites has videos that I paid for and:
- I didn’t want people to have access to them that shouldn’t have access
- I didn’t want anyone that does have access to abuse the links (share them with people they shouldn’t)
- I didn’t want my members to download my videos – not because I didn’t want them to have them, but because what I really want is for them to return to my site so I can maintain an active, interactive relationship with them
Problem #1 was solved by my Micro-Membership plugin. I almost solved problems 2 & 3 with Amazon’s Simple Storage Services (S3). Not only is S3 a great platform for streaming video but it allows you to protect your content with access control lists (ACLs). They’ve implemented “Query String Authentication” which lets you add information to the end of your links that Amazon uses to verify authorization. The links can also be time-limited so that they expire after a given period of time.
The concept is great. Unfortunately, the implementation leaves me less than whelmed – mainly because the “extra characters” Amazon S3 uses for authentication just knock the cr@p out of most FLV players.
Fortunately, I’ve found a combination of a WordPress FLV player plugin (Hana FLV player) and a modified security plugin (Amazon S3 URL Generator) that seems to do the trick. ...
Enjoy!
Ralph