Hi,<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?
Screencams.<p>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 <i>reliably</i> (see 'screencams') stop others from recording the stream then there will be a market for that.<p>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.
Two thoughts:<p>- pirates will circumvent it; it sounds like the player is not-especially-well-obfuscated software running on standard PCs.<p>- people will probably still pay extra for it; it sounds good, and it does deter piracy at least a little.<p>That said, watermarking and banning anyone whose videos are found on TPB probably works better.
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.<p>Sadly, they have discontinued this feature. But yeah, I think this was one of the features that <i>I think</i> made them popular.
Forgive my ignorance, but how is it possible to encrypt the video on the fly?<p>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?
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.