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Ask HN: Does disallowing people to download streaming videos help?

4 points by angrisha ↗ HN
Hi,

I am working with a senior of mine in college who is building a video streaming platform which encrypts data packets on the fly. As a result, the video cannot be downloaded for offline viewing. This is an additional feature he added to the project which originally was intended to build a faster video streaming server software.

We have had a discussion on this and he feels that this adds more value to the video serving company. However I was not convinced.

So here goes my question : Does disallowing downloads to people for offline viewing do any good? Why not allow people to download videos for offline viewing?

11 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 31.2 ms ] thread
saurabh
I guess so. I loved blip.tv because they allowed me to download the videos to watch them offline and that too in multiple formats.

Sadly, they have discontinued this feature. But yeah, I think this was one of the features that I think made them popular.

mooism2
It depends really. If someone downloaded your videos and uploaded them to YouTube, would you demand YouTube take them down? If not then you should certainly not hinder people from downloading them.
0x12
Screencams.

One good reason to not allow 'dowload' of a video is if it is a live stream of a person. People will say/do stuff on cam that they may later come to regret, if your platform can reliably (see 'screencams') stop others from recording the stream then there will be a market for that.

But you've got a lot of extra issues to contend with in your streaming server, it's hard enough just to pump the data out, if you have to uniquely encrypt a few tens of thousands of outgoing streams that is a real problem.

JoachimSchipper
Just a note: per-stream encryption keys may make sense[1], but there's no need to encrypt the stream to different per-person keys - you can just encrypt the per-stream key with the per-person key and send it to the authorized users.

Your comment was not clear on this, but this obviously reduces the encryption overhead.

[1] It's not much harder for a pirate to build a script to extract the per-stream key from the player than it is to extract the key in the first place, so using a per-stream key instead of one key doesn't really help against piracy. It does help keep streams private against eavesdroppers, though.

mikeknoop
Just don't forget -- it's even easier to install desktop-recording software.
JoachimSchipper
Honest question: doesn't that lose a lot of quality? (YouTube has shown that low-quality video can still be popular, but at least it would give pirates some reason to pay you.)
angrisha
I agree. However use of desktop recording softwares is similar to using an audio recorder to record a song on the radio. We cant do anything about it <nothing as far as I know. >

The main aim was to remove the download capability of the ubiquitous downloading tools/plugins (like FlashGot, DownloadThemAll, VLC etc) which mainly use the video saved in the cache. So far we have been successful in that.

Ideas to avoid recording via a screencam, anyone??

Random_Person
I guess that kind of makes the point. If you can't stop it being recorded, what does the encryption serve? If it is content that is worth anything, it will be screen capped and pirated within a few hours.

Are you just hoping to serve adds every time a casual user wants to watch a video because their simple download tools dont' work?

JoachimSchipper
Two thoughts:

- pirates will circumvent it; it sounds like the player is not-especially-well-obfuscated software running on standard PCs.

- people will probably still pay extra for it; it sounds good, and it does deter piracy at least a little.

That said, watermarking and banning anyone whose videos are found on TPB probably works better.

anujkk
How about making it optional?

1. No downloads, watch online.

2. Downloads allowed, no charges.

3. Download allowed, after payment.

akavi
Forgive my ignorance, but how is it possible to encrypt the video on the fly?

Doesn't the client software have to know how to decrypt it in order to view it? And once that's available, what's to prevent someone from grabbing that decrypted stream?