How is Panda Video more secure than Vimeo?

You spend time and money creating your course on the Internet and some malicious people download your content to make it available for free, resell it on the Internet or even make it available for download in a group of friends. This is a common situation that affects thousands of infoproducers who are concerned about the security of their content.

If you search on google, you will find several Vimeo video download chrome extensions. Just install the extension in Chrome (with one click) and the functionality of downloading videos without any restrictions is enabled in your browser. It is astonishing how easily a user, without the slightest technical knowledge, can download any video from Vimeo. This is due to the simple fact that Vimeo provides the MP4 file, which can be downloaded easily. Test it yourself on your content and you will see the extreme fragility of your content hosted on Vimeo.

How does it work in Panda Video?

Our mission is to give infoproducers tools to sell more with focused video features on sales pages like autoplay and also provide security for the content made available. It is important to say that, technically, when you watch a video on the Internet, be it Youtube, Vimeo, Netflix or any other, you are "downloading" (in quotes) the content to watch. So, there is no way to prevent people from "downloading" the content, but we are able to greatly reduce the impact by understanding the dynamics of how content is made available.

As the most important security is for video content that must be made available in a closed manner, we use three levels of security.

Level 1: Domain protection (simple)
Level 2: Delivery via HLS (MP4 file is not available)
Level 3: DRM (watermarking)

It is also worth mentioning that we have a Chrome extension that does all the migration of videos from Vimeo to Panda (without need to download to your computer).

Level 1: Is Domain Protection Enough?

Not. Domain protection from Vimeo (or any other similar streaming service, including Panda) is just a blocking of the HTTP request. We don't want to get too technical in this article, but basically when content is accessed on the Internet, the browser sends several headers in the request, including referer that indicates the address of the previous page (or where the content is embedded). Any programmer with little knowledge would know how to pass any address in this request or simulate a domain.

Thus, we do not believe that domain protection is something that should be taken into account, although it is also possible to configure this blocking in Panda Vídeo. Do not consider this a key point for the security of your content.

Level 2: Delivery via HLS

Although this is not an item that can be classified as security, it ends up making it a little more difficult to download the video. While on Vimeo you have the video fully exposed with the MP4 file, here there is no such possibility. This means that via HLS, content is made available in dozens (or hundreds) of small chunks. When you move forward or backward in the video, only that part of that position is accessed.

Thus, your video is composed of many pieces and to download it would be necessary to take each one of the pieces and then "join". This process requires a little more technical knowledge to reencode the video.

Delivery of content via HLS is highly recommended, see how video traffic works to understand what happens when you send a file to Panda and how it is delivered to the player.

Level 3: DRM (watermarking)

Although the name we are referring to this resource is DRM (Digital Rights Management), it is just to make it easier to understand that here, in fact, there is a security capable of identifying the user. Panda's DRM solution is a watermarking solution, where we mark the video itself with the user's sensitive data. There are other DRM solutions like content encryption to deliver the video to each user, but these solutions are cost prohibitive for most customers. Thus, we developed a watermarking solution capable of having a good protection ratio without having a high cost.

With our DRM (watermarking) enabled, the personal information of the user who is watching the video is encoded in real time in the video itself, that is, you see something like "Licensed to José Silva (CPF xxx.xxx.xxx-xx) ". The information you put in the video is fully configurable and can be CPF, E-Mail, CNPJ, CRM or any other information you want.

The cost-benefit ratio lies in the fact that you can tag part of the content (fully configurable), that is, a 20-minute video can have something like 10% (or more, depending on the configuration) of the tagged video. So, during the 20 minutes of the video, for 2 minutes (several pieces of about 4 seconds that, added together, make up 2 minutes). The cost of DRM is only on the parts that have been marked, so we were able to reduce the final price a lot.

It is important to say that we see some member areas using content tagging like name and CPF but they are not real video tags and this is not done securely. These cases are elements placed above the player (on the page) and can be easily removed in the browser. You can check by inspecting the browser player.

Panda's solution, in fact, encodes the data in the video itself, that is, there is no way to remove this content (as in the case of the element above the player). The only way is to reencode the video with a black stripe on top. This helps a lot in combating piracy or simply preventing it from being shared in a circle of friends, as no one wants to see their data with other people.

This DRM service will be available within a few days on the platform and can be contracted separately. Soon, we will provide an article here with details of how it works.

If you don't have a Panda account yet, we invite you to test our system for 30 days free. I'm sure you'll like the support in Portuguese and the solution we're creating for digital marketing and distance learning. Come with us!

Many customers also have problems with very high values sent by Vimeo.

Got any questions or want to know more?

Just call us in our support chat and our team will do their best to solve your doubts or difficulties? Already use Panda Video? If not, know that both our player and our prices are unbeatable, if you are interested, take a look at our plans, in this way, it may be that some of them make sense with your product and as a gift you will still become another little panda. 🐼

Updated on: 04/11/2023