Copyright Protection: Mobile encryption and authorization

We have talked about the means for copyright protection in the previous articles. Those methods works well in PCs and laptops, covering operation systems like Windows, OS X and Linux.

However, for the mobile playback, most of the video services don’t have any protection or encryption, making the videos easy targets to be pirating.

For POLYV users, you don’t have to worry about the safety issue of mobile playback – we have integrated encryption method based on Apple HLS for mobile devices, and you can activate it in an instance –

1. After signing in POLYV, select “Videos” to enter the admin page of Video Cloud.

2. Click “Settings” on the right of the top navigation bar, then click “Encryption settings” on the popup menu.

3. In the “Video encryption” section, first click on the check box to enable VRM, then go to the “Mobile encryption settings” section to select the encryption mode –

• General use – The videos will be encrypted, then the encryption key will be sent to mobile devices and the video can be played in mobile web directly with our universal code (JavaScript). No extra settings needed.
• WEB & APP use – The videos will be encrypted with a key with both Web and App authorization. The videos can be decoded and played in mobile web as well as the apps integrated with POLYV SDK (Android or iOS).
• APP use only – The videos will be encrypted with a key with ONLY App authorization. The videos can be decoded and played in the apps integrated with POLYV SDK (Android or iOS), but NOT available for mobile web playback.

[For detailed information and development rules of Web and App authorization, click here to check out our development document (in Simplified Chinese).]

Note that the mobile encryption settings will only apply on the videos uploaded after enabling this feature, and those videos uploaded before enabling mobile encryption will not be affected.

With this particular safe switch for mobile playback, you don’t have to worry about someone pirating your videos by cracking the mobile page or the app.

If you want to learn more about the security features of Video Cloud and Streaming Cloud, check out our blog or visit our official website http://www.polyv.net/ for more information. And don’t forget to check out our previous blogs on copyright protection!

Happy video hosting, and see you in the next article!

Copyright Protection: Password Protection

Password protection is another simple and effective way to protect your videos in Video Cloud. By setting password to specific videos, you can limit the access of the video to designated people or groups, and those who don’t have the password of the videos are not able to watch.

Here we’ll show you how to set password for the videos. Let’s get started!

1. After signing in POLYV, select “Videos” to enter the admin page of Video Cloud.

2. Click “Video” on the top navigation bar to enter the video list, then select the videos you want to set password on, and click “Video settings” on the top of the list.

3. On the popup window, type in the password you want in the “Password” field. If you want to make sure if the password is correct, check the “Show password” checkbox below the field.

4. Click “Save” to apply the settings and return to video list.

Here’s the video with the password protection on, and error message pops up if you type in an incorrect password.

So this is how to activate password protection for your videos. If you want to know more about the features of Video Cloud and Streaming Cloud, check out our blog or visit our official website http://www.polyv.net/ for more information, and stay tuned for more tutorials on copyright protection.

POLYV: A look back on 2016

Howdy! As in the first week of 2017, we think it’s time to take a look back on what we have done over the last year.

For us, one of the most important event this year is the Pre-A venture capital funding in May. The million-dollar funding was approved by Hike Capital, one of the largest venture capitals in China, and will be utilized in different fields, including online education, big data combined with VR research, and video identification known as “Video DNA”.

With this funding, we can now serve our users and clients even better, as well as focus on our research for more leading-edge technologies.

Another key event of ours is that we officially obtained the TRUCS certification in September. The certification is signed by Data Center Alliance (DCA), an association of cloud service and security led by Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and China Communications Standards Association (CCSA).

Unlike Alibaba, Tencent and other cloud services, we are the only one to exclusively provide SaaS service for videos among the TRUCS-certified cloud services. We attribute the certification to the recognition from the security authorities of DCA, as well as from the over 24,000 clients we serve over the years.

Besides, we received several awards and honors, including 3rd Prize of China Innovation & Entrepreneurship Competition (CIEC), New & Dashing Technology Prize of China Education Gala 2016, Certification of National High Technology Enterprises and more.

Once again, these honors are not for bragging about how great we are doing – they are the recognitions from the clients and authorities for our technologies and products, and reminding us of never stop developing and going further for the better.

As our business grows bigger and bigger, the sense of responsibility is growing, too. For the first time, our Streaming Cloud service played an important role in community activities – a 3-day live streaming classroom for the high school students in Beijing due to the severe smog weather.

As regarding “Driving value with video” as our ambition, we fulfill it by serving in such community or public affairs to help or benefit more people. It is a good kickstart and we will keep on with it from then on.

For promotions and marketing, we have participated in many tech salons, fairs and exhibitions, of which the biggest one is GET2016: Global Education Technology Summit & Expo. It is our honor to meet with great entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and leading professionals from all over the world, in both education and technology fields.

We really appreciate their speeches as well as the insights and prospects shared in the expo. Besides, many participants and corporations are very interested with our VR live streaming demo at the vendor. We have collected their feedback as they try it, and will consider them as a reference in the developing process.

And, we are beginning the overseas promotion. Back in August 2016, we started to plan about the international website, social media, blogs and other optimizations, and then started with the construction of blogs.

So far our blogs have been running well, and brought us the first few international clients for video hosting and live streaming. For international site, it is now in design stage, and will be deployed later this year.

And for the most important part – our product research and development, 2016 is the key year for Streaming Cloud – we started to promote this live streaming service in Q2, not only for market share, but also to test out the stability and load balancing.

Then, with weekly minor updates, the release of new PC client and mobile app, account linking between Video Cloud and Streaming Cloud, and more CDN nodes put into use, we had a great breakthrough in Q4: significant boost in both users and sales for Streaming Cloud, as well as gaining reputation from various type of clients and users.

We also made a demo for VR live streaming (as mentioned above in the promotion and marketing section), and some attempts in other new technologies including video recognition. We will notify you if new features or further updates are released.

The bottom line, we have been growing fast over 2016, and embracing the latest technologies for videos. For the brand new 2017, we will continue providing better video services and developing more useful functions and leading-edge features to meet our clients’ demands.

We’ll keep exploring. What about you?

Video Marketing Gadgets: QR code settings (Part 2 – Streaming Cloud)

Previously we have talked about how to set up QR code sharing in Video Cloud. Now we’ll move on to Streaming Cloud to see how to utilize QR code for your livestreams.

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Compared to general videos, the access control of live streaming is a little bit more complicated and needs some further settings – not only to filter out unwanted or unauthorized audience, but also to ensure the content of livestreams are delivered securely to the expected audience, or to promote the streaming channels to social network.

For these requirements, QR code is the best solution – it is social friendly and more secure compared to traditional password or digit authorization tokens.

Here we’ll show how to configure the QR code settings in POLYV’s Streaming Cloud.

1. After signing in POLYV, select “Live” to enter the admin page of Streaming Cloud.

2. Select “Channels” in the navigation bar to browse or set up your existing channels.

If you don’t have any channel, or want to create a new one, you can either select “Create channel” in the navigation bar, or click “Create live streaming channel” on the left side, then enter the name of the new channel and click “Apply”.

3. Click the “Settings” button, and select “General information” to set up preferences of the channel. You can also simply click on the name of channel to enter the setting section.

4. Click the “View conditions” tab on the left panel, then select “View by verification code” tab at the top of the right panel to set up the preferences of QR code and related information.

• Heading text: Recommend using the name of the company.
• Custom verification code: A string of characters as the verification when the audience access to the streaming channel. (Not required)
• QR code: When enabled, the audience are verified by following the social media accounts like WeChat Official Accounts, Facebook Pages or Twitter account. You can upload the corresponding QR code by clicking the “Upload QR code” button below.
• Hinting text: Recommend using the name of social media account/pages.
• Share and Watch: You can share the livestream with other people by sharing the QR code when enabled.

Here’s how it looks like in the actual device when you get access and enter the channel –

Verification on PC

Livestream player on PC

Verification (left) and player (right) on mobile device

With the help of POLYV’s Streaming Cloud and its QR code sharing features, you can now share your livestreams more effectively and securely to your audience through social network.

If you want to know more about the features of Video Cloud or Streaming Cloud, you can subscribe to our blog for latest articles, or visit our official website for more information.

Happy live streaming!

Video Marketing Gadgets: QR code settings (Part 1 – Video Cloud)

How do you share and promote your well-orchestrated video? Well, QR code is one of the fastest and most convenient ways to go – it provides a connection link between the company and the audience to communicate and interact within.

POLYV provides QR code sharing and promoting for both Video Cloud and Streaming Cloud. In this chapter we will talk about how to set up QR code sharing in Video Cloud.

1. After signing in POLYV, select “Video Cloud” on the navigation bar of admin index page, then click “Videos” tab on the navigation bar.

2. Select the video that you want to apply QR code sharing, then click “Share to WeChat” on the right panel.

“Share to WeChat” settings in Video Cloud

Here we can see the QR code for the designated video. You can share this QR code to WeChat, QQ or other social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and so on.

QR code for designated video

Also, you can share the video via the “Share” icon, with a popup layer with links and QR code.

QR code popup in the video player

Here’s how the video looks like when you use “Scan QR code” in WeChat (Similar when opens with QR code scanner or other social apps with QR code scanning) –

Video player after the scan of QR code

Video player after the scan of QR code

With the feature of QR code sharing, it is now easier to share and promote your videos, and have more interactions with your friends through various social networks.

We’ll talk about the QR code settings for Streaming Cloud in our next article, so stay tune for Part 2 of the tutorial.

POLYV in GET2016: Video service in online education (Part 2)

In our previous article, Reako Xie, founder of POLYV, showed us his creative perspective on online education and e-commerce, and made a comparison between them.

Here we deliver the second part of his speech, focusing the major issues of the video application in e-learning and online education.

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Reako Xie, Founder of POLYV, talked about video applications and issues in online education industry at the seminar of GET2016

Video is getting more and more important in nowadays internet technology. It is also the skeleton of the online education industry, influencing the process of teaching and learning.

Video has great advantages like containing massive information, well intuitive and interactive, which is unparalleled to texts and graphics. However, video needs a great amount of time for production and takes up lots of space and traffic for hosting, which is an obstacle for wide commercial use.

Here are the three major issues we have encountered –

First, piracy. It grows easily because videos are highly replicable, and the cost is legitimately low without effective copyright control.

Here we take the example of music records. It is a great industry over the 20th century, generating thousands of superstars and celebrities as well as tremendous value. However, at the beginning of the 21st century, music piracy has breached the industry thanks to the develop of the internet and the technology of audio compression in the cloud. That’s when music piracy becomes very simple that everyone can do this, and eventually the industry goes downhill.

As far as I concern in this case, I think it is just not enough to expect the fulfilment of the law, or everyone has the sense of copyrighting. We must take action and protect the video content from piracy.

As we all know, videos, presentations and other materials are the core resources for online educators and e-learning organizations. Once the resources are leaked and being sold at a really low price, it will devastate the whole online education industry.

To prevent this, POLYV releases the first generation of DRM (Digital Rights Management). Most of the 4000 primary users at that time subscribe our plan because of the DRM feature. And, after the development of over 3 years, the DRM prototype has evolved into PlaySafe DRM ecosystem, including fragmentation encryption on all kinds of content, anti-downloading, domain lists, anti-capturing and more. We will release new piracy proof system later this year, to protect the content from our users in full scope.

No system is absolutely safe, but we believe piracy can be inhibited by increasing the cost of obtaining the content illegally and compromising the experience of pirated content.

Second, the video content is non-structured. In other words, the content, plot or details in the video are unable to be indexed or searched, nor to be accurately positioned for a specific chapter or key point, making it inefficient to obtain our desired content.

To solve this issue, we develop an audio recognition system, which can accurately recognize different voice by learning, build up an index of the video and generate captions or subtitles automatically, which really help with the indexing and searching of the content.

Besides, the audio recognition system can sort the key points of the videos, identify the courses from different teachers and classify them by author, topics or length, you name it. All the actions are processed automatically without manual intervention, even if there are millions of videos. Only when sorted do data become knowledge, and that is the foundation of digital content management.

Third, immersive learning. Currently, this is one of the major difference between online education and traditional learning, and VR is a possible and potential way to solve it.

We made lots of experiments and exploration on VR (Virtual Reality), and some of the VR products have been released. We have introduced our VR devices in May this year and will release VR app in December. Our VR live streaming has been applied for online education, which is affordable and cost efficient in both software and hardware.

For now, we are developing an app for external video live streaming, which will be released at the end of this year, and will support Oculus and Microsoft Hololens in the future. We hope that POLYV will become a connection between videos and VR, and aid live streaming for online education.

We believe that with the popularity of VR, it will be the turning point for online education.

That’s all for my speech. Thank you all very much.

Practical guide to choose your video hosting service – Part 2

In Part 1, we have talked about the budget and playback experience when choosing your video hosting for business. Here we continue our talk on this topic.

3. Access Control

For most of the free video hosting services, your content are to be viewed by anyone who have the access of the hosting site — in other words, everyone can watch your videos.

However, for business and corporation, security features are vital, especially for those content that can be only accessed by employees within their network.

Here are some of the features on security and access control for your reference —

• Password portection – simple, yet traditional way of access control. Usually only the distributors have the password, so it is simple to control who can view these videos.
• Authentication tokens – sometimes the videos can still be accessed to unwanted audience when the passwords are leaked or not working well, then authentication tokens steps in — it is a string of unique codes generated with advanced algorithm, and the authentication can only be approved within the device and the viewer’s account, which significantly increases security with no effort from the administrators of the business;
• Website/domain list – this is another specific way to restrict your videos to be viewed in specific audience, or the websites/domains you own. You can simply add the address of your websites, or IPs of your internal network domains to the white list, and those outside the list are unable to access the videos.

4. Digital Rights Management

Access control is only part of the protection for your precious videos. To prevent your videos from being pirated completely, DRM — or Digital Rights Management, is vital for a professional video hosting.

Here are some of the features that should be included in the DRM of a good video hosting —

• Advanced encryption – it is easy to hack the content with only one specific encryption method, but not in the case of using various random methods in different sections of the video. With these advanced encryption methods, even the content is downloaded, it is impossible to decrypt and recover it to be played in general media players.
• Fragmentation transcoding – it means your video will be divided into lots of small sections which then being transcoded. It helps to make the video stream faster, and significantly increase the difficulty of content pirates accessing and restoring the whole video;
• Encryption on mobile – many video hosting services have been doing great on the rights management on PC, but not on mobile playback. Some, like POLYV, have their very own solution for mobile encryption, keeping your content away from pirates and unwanted audience.

Digital Rights Management, along with access control, are very crucial for the content protection in video hosting service. You just don’t want your time and effort ends up with someone else taking your credit of video, do you?

And that’s the end of Part 2 of our guide for your video hosting service. Stay tune and we’ll be back for the third part.

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Update: We have updated Part 3 for the final chapter of the series. Click here to read this article.