Secure Your Video Streams with Signed URLs: Easy Token-Based Protection 

Did you know that your streaming video can be shared by your audience if you don’t protect it. With just a few simple steps, a viewer can fetch the manifest URL from network tools in their browser and re-publish it elsewhere. Now, there are many applications where there isn’t much incentive to re-publish the streams like this, for example when the content is already easily accessible, free of charge, ad-driven etc. and thus the risk of ungranted sharing if the content is not too high. In other cases, this is not acceptable, regardless of the risk. 

With our feature Signed URL’s, you can secure the delivery of the content by tokenized URL’s. Sounds complicated? Not necessarily. The feature comes in two flavors, basic and advanced. With the basic tokens, you get a 48-hour accessible window, with zero development on the customer application side 

Protect your valuable video content with new token authentication, allowing you to control who can access your streams and for how long. Choose between simple 48-hour tokens or the more advanced, customizable access control that follows the Common access token standard.  

With the basic token feature, you grant access to the video stream for a 48-hour time window. Anyone who tries to re-stream the content will fail to do so after the time window. The player will automatically refresh the session so that the valid playback session is applicable for the time that the content owner decides.  

With the advanced token, you can pinpoint your audience by geographical region, utilize the benefit of personal tokens to avoid any unauthorized usage of your content.  

Signed URL’s is thus a perfect way for you who want to add security to the delivery of your content.  

While tokenized URLs do not protect the content files as such, only the delivery of this content. If you want additional security, you can add DRM encryption to the content. But we think that the Signed URL’s is sufficient for most cases, since the delivery of content is an important part on the process of streaming video, not to mention that the delivery and storage is a large part of the total streaming cost, and thus it can be even more attractive to republish the stream unauthorized than to download the actual content and arrange a new distribution.  

If you are already a Wowza Video customer, we recommend you check out the brand-new Signed URLs feature and if you want to talk to us about it or anything else regarding video, reach out to us below and we will schedule a meeting.