Online Video and Live Stream Security

Are you a broadcaster in search of the latest in live stream security for your video content? Looking for a reliable and secure video streaming solution? As a professional live video streaming solution, Dacast has honed its security features to best protect your video content. Video content includes both live broadcast content along with on-demand video material. To date, Dacast’s security features include the following:

• Network Background
• Designed for Security
• Token Security
• Domain Restriction
• Geographic Restriction
• Constant System Monitoring
• Availability
• Watermarking
• Streaming Process
• Viewer Payment Security

Network Background

The Dacast online network is broadcast from a content delivery network (CDN) data center that spans the globe. This global point of presence approach guarantees an instantaneous connection regardless of geographic location. Servers, located directly within the CDN data center, handle file uploads. After upload, the files then pass to a cloud infrastructure for storage and security.

Dacast uses the Akamai CDN, one of the largest global CDNs. 24/7 network monitoring backs the network. All our servers use RAID 5 security. In the instance of a server crash, a live stream will be redirected to another server. All this means you can leave the server logistics to us, and just focus on your streams!

Designed for Security

Dacast takes live stream security very seriously – it’s our job. Because we offer a monetization approach, we have to ensure that all streams, both paid and free, offer the most up to date security to avoid unwanted viewing.

The Dacast infrastructure has been designed to provide the highest availability while putting strong safeguards in place regarding your video streaming and storage. Dacast manages the underlying infrastructure, and you can secure anything you upload or stream with the video service.

Token Security

All streams are secured through a token. This prevents the content from being redirected to a third-party source, for example, another player, without the approval of the content owner.

Domain Restriction

Through a feature called referrers, broadcasters can lock their content to a specific domain. This prevents other users from looking at your source code, finding the embed link, and then embedding it on another website.

For example, let’s say a broadcaster’s website is https://www.mywebsite.com. They can set up a referrer on this URL that will restrict your video content’s playback to this specific domain. So what happens if, for example, https://www.pirate.com attempts to grab the embed code and place it on their own site? Rest assured that the content will fail to play.

Note that this feature is only available over the JS (Javascript) player. In this case, it uses an advanced feature to detect the domain before playback. The iframe embed code does not have this same feature available.

Geographic Restriction

Using geo-localization, Dacast can also restrict content on a country basis. This is done via the viewer’s IP address. If the IP address belongs to a country that does not have access, that viewer is blocked from watching.

In terms of accuracy, this does rely partially on the ISP of the viewer. While narrowing an IP address to a specific city is not accurate, narrowing it down to a specific country generally is. In fact, the accuracy of this approach, on an IP basis, is about 95-99%.

Constant System Monitoring

Dacast live stream security includes protection by extensive network and security monitoring systems. This protection includes continuous scanning and testing.

For video storage, content requires a separate set of credentials for access. These credentials consist of SSH public-key authentication through a bastion host using an MFA token. For both stability and security, security managers from our partners monitor and review this on a daily basis.

Availability

Dacast utilizes a network that has data centers in multiple geographic regions. This worldwide server network is used for both live streaming and video storage. The large network is utilized to offer maximum resiliency against system outages.

For video storage, these data centers are designed with significant excess bandwidth connections. This means that if a major disruption occurs, there is sufficient capacity to enable load-balanced traffic to the remaining sites. This, in turn, minimizes the impact of a major disruption.

Watermarking

Dacast is a fully white-label streaming service. You can broadcast Dacast content over a customizable player. Called a player theme, part of this function includes the ability to watermark your own content to protect it. You can upload the desired logo and have this appear directly above the video layer.

The benefit of this feature is twofold. First, it gives an added level of live stream security in the sense that you maintain rights to your own content. Secondly, it allows you to professionally personalize your own content without any branding or ads from video streaming platforms.

Streaming Process

Content presented over the Dacast service displays in a streaming format only. There is no option to download the stream from inside the player. This prevents any vulnerabilities that might arise from content downloaded and shared illegally. Likewise, it prevents any other circumstances in which your content could be compromised through a download feature.

Viewer Payment Security

For viewer payments done over the Dacast paywall, this data is transmitted with full SSL encryption. The encryption process involves a series of checks that help to ensure the data transmits securely. A series of steps with unique encryption helps to preserve details.

In the first step, the browser requests that the Dacast server identifies itself. The Dacast server then relays the browser a copy of its SSL certificate. The browser then checks the validity of the certificate. Then, it sends a message back to Dacast upon acceptance. The Dacast server then begins an SSL encrypted session. Finally, important data, such as payment details like credit card data, shares securely between the browser and Dacast.

In addition, Dacast also provides accounts to your viewers. These accounts link to an email address, which has its own password. These accounts allow for additional logins past the initial purchase. To prevent exploitation of paid access, Dacast has a feature that prevents multi-login. The account logs out the first viewer when the system detects another viewer. If you’re interested, you can read more about this process here.

Conclusion

The Dacast OVP (online video platform) prides itself on its multi-tiered security features. Many of these features were born out of necessity for the benefit of our Pay Per View broadcasters. Yet these benefits trickle down to all of our users, and we’re glad they do!

If you’re a Dacast customer seeking support with any of these features, just log into your account to access the 24/7 in-house support team. Not yet a customer but curious to learn more? Why not take advantage of our 14-day free trial (no credit card required) to try out all the Dacast features for yourself?

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Have a specific question about live stream security or how we help to protect your content? Feel free to respond in the comment area below. We love to hear from our readers, and we strive to incorporate content related to your questions in future articles. Finally, for exclusive offers and regular live streaming tips, join our LinkedIn group.

We hope you found this article useful, and thanks for reading!

By Max Wilbert.