Video courses - How and why protect them?

If you are looking to launch your online video courses or a new e-learning platform, you already know that, in order to have a long term path, besides offering a good teaching method you need to protect your content to stay alive in the wild world of internet.

To help you in this hard work, today we will take a closer look at how to prevent downloading your online video courses and which plugin can help you in this endeavor.

PROTECT YOUR VIDEO COURSES AND CONTENT FROM DOWNLOADING

Although the intention of every video creator is to reach the screens of as many people as possible, when this happens without permission, it can lead to unexpected and not always positive consequences.

When you have a membership site or an e-learning platform, it’s really important to prevent users from illegally downloading your video courses and that’s because your content could be used and redistributed by them to non-paying profiteers, which means loss of profit.

But is it really possible to protect your own content online?

The main answers on Google regarding this topic question say that preventing video download is very difficult, almost impossible, if not through specific “layers of security and prevention” that you can apply to your video but that can not, in any case, 100% prevent the downloads of them, especially if they are downloaded by malicious professionals in the industry and online piracy.

The possible options that will be suggested to you will be for example:

• Use Signed URLs.
• To Avoid the Use of HTML.
• Prefer the use of Video Stream.
• Encrypting the Video.

But how can you start using these recommendations?

Firstly we recommend you to use the right video hosting service for your videos.

Youtube, for example, is a great platform to arrive at as many folks as possible but in terms of security of your content, is not the best option.

We advise instead using Cloudflare Stream to your videos on-site because can guarantee through the use of the well- know Cloudflare technology the maximum security for your content.
Thanks to this new extension, you can take advantage of one of the most secure, fast and reliable CDN on earth (same performance as Google and Akamai) that, with his more than 200 servers around the globe, will give you the possibility of being able to stream your videos from any location super fast. In addition to all that, CF stream allows for top-notch technology to secure your videos!

How? By using some of the security features we mentioned earlier:

• Signed URLs: That shows a time-limited token instead of the video URL. This token will expire soon after the user stops the streaming, leaving behind a useless URL.
• HLS technology: Used also by Youtube. Divides the video into small chunks making video downloading difficult
• Whitelist only some domains: That prevent someone to take the link and paste it in any other location different from the whitelisted domains
• Encryption / JWT: A standardized access token that allows secure data exchange between two parties (client and server)

–Yes but what if my videos are already inside my WordPress website?

Well, also for this question we have the right solution for you and it is called: CF Power Tools

Another great quality of this plugin is its ease of use.
You won’t need to be a computer genius or a programmer to use it.

All you have to do is buy one of the packages offered, download it, install it on your WordPress as you would with any plugin, and start protecting your video courses and content!

We hope you enjoyed our post about How to Protect Your Video Courses and Content from Being Downloaded.

We know that you’re working hard to create valuable content for your subscribers, and we want to make sure that you’re able to do your best work without worrying about your content being stolen. Plagiarism is something that can really hurt your reputation, especially when you are using video to teach more complex skills.

We understand the importance of protecting your content, so we wanted to share some resources to help you protect your videos.

If you ever have concerns about your content being stolen, please feel free to contact us any time at our help center.