Podcast Security
by JohnnyRoundGuy
on
Jun 15, 2006 at 4:01:11 pm
OK - Now the question has been brought up "How do I make my Podcast Secure?"
So how does one do this? I could put it behind a login/pass page and make it secure that way, but what will stop people from emailing the Rss Feed to someone else to listen to it? Is there a work around for this? How do individuals who have fee based podcasts stop people from "sharing"?
Re: Podcast Security by Jonathan Miller on Jun 15, 2006 at 6:18:53 pm
Yes, I feel this will become more of an issue over the next few years as podcasting continues to grow in popularity.
Keep in mind, though, that there's very little you can do to stop people from "stealing" your content if they really want to. Just think about pirated software, etc. If they really want it, they'll get it. Luckily, you'll probably find that the vast majority of your listeners will play by the rules. They are the ones who paid for it, and wouldn't want to give it away for free.
So, right now I'm offering "bonus" content to any viewer who donates money to my Everest podcast. In return for their donation, I create a customized RSS feed as outlined in one of my previous posts:
Like I said in the post, you can monitor how many people are subscribed to that feed. I believe FeedBurner tracks the IP addresses of the computers requesting the feed to determine use. Your stats look like this:
OK, so if they were sharing the feed with more than one person (and IP address) then you could see that in your stats, and politely warn them to stop, or cancel their feed.
The feeds that are listed as having zero subscribers simply means that they are not "hitting" their feed, and have already downloaded my content. If you have an ongoing podcast with new episodes being posted it wouldn't give you a stat of zero subscribers unless no one had accessed that feed yet.
Re: Podcast Security by whyisjake on Jun 16, 2006 at 12:18:06 am
I am hosting a few podcasts for companies, and security is a large item that I am trying to deal with as there are a few trade secrets taht get thrown around. While hosting, I write a little script into the Apache conf file that makes anything beyond the title page password protected. After they progress past the password, they can get the feed. 90% of my subscribers are using iTunes which will prompt them for the password, and then download the feed. This has been working well for me, any others?
For an example check out: www.firstlinepodcast.com
Re: Podcast Security by Eric Bliss on Jun 16, 2006 at 12:59:14 am
I think that the main thing that people need to remember here is that when people are talking about protecting their podcasts, the main thing that they want to protect are the EPISODES, not the RSS feed. The individual .mp3, or .m4v files are the things that you really want to set the security on. Each episode has it's own URL where the media file resides online, and if that isn't protected, it doesn't really matter what you do with the RSS feed itself - URLs can be mailed from person to person just as easily as read by a podcatcher.
If you really want to secure your episodes, you should look into solutions to password-protect or otherwise restrict access to the location where the media files are kept. Various E-Commerce solutions already exist for requiring payment before a file can be downloaded, and to restrict the number of times that it can be downloaded, and those are probably the solutions that you want to look into.
Re: Podcast Security by Jonathan Miller on Jun 16, 2006 at 4:31:06 am
Eric's right on the money here. Very good point.
Ultimately, you want control over the end user having the right to play the file, especially in circunstances such as Jake's where the audio/video may contain trade secrets. There are a plethora of uses for podcasts that could benefit from this kind of security.
Unfortunately, I know of no simple (in terms of technical difficulty and/or monetary expense) way of implementing DRM for a podcast.
I admit that, in general, podcast listeners are more tech savy than the general public. However, I still feel that most of them don't really understand the underlying mechanics of podcasting with it's RSS feed written in XML. So, for my needs right now, being able to keep track of who's downloading a specific RSS feed works pretty well. I don't feel that people are sharing the files' url. Maybe I'm wrong though.
Again, for what I'm trying to accomplish, it works like a charm. Of course other people's mileage may vary.
What I do know, is that the podcasting universe has still just been born. These issues of DRM will get more attention over the next few years. If not the next few months.
