Protecting Videos on iOS Devices with HLS Encryption

This article describes how to protect your videos playing on iOS mobile devices with the Video Cloud HLS encryption feature. Video Cloud HLS encryption is available only to Video Cloud Pro and Enterprise publishers; the information in this article is not relevant for Video Cloud Express publishers.

What is Video Cloud HLS encryption?

HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) Encryption lets you send encrypted video over HTTP for playback on devices running iOS including, the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. It utilizes the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) as well as other technologies to seamlessly protect content from non-authorized streaming, piracy, and redistribution by others, with no detectable difference to video playback. Video Cloud supports Apple HLS encryption on all devices and operating systems currently supported for HTML5 Players.

How does Video Cloud protect your content using HLS encryption?

Apple HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), independent of encryption, is a video serving protocol for Apple devices at different bit rates. Video Cloud supports creating multiple renditions for Apple devices that switch intelligently between Apple's HTTP streams as network bandwidth changes, and as service fluctuates between WiFi and 3G. To serve videos to Apple devices, Apple HLS essentially breaks a video into a sequence of small file downloads, each loading one short chunk, or segment, of the video at a time over HTTP. Apple requires HLS for long-form videos, that is, videos greater than 5 Mb, or longer than 10 minutes. In order to play videos longer than approximately 10 minutes on iOS devices, regardless of encryption, you must create video renditions with a required codec container of an m2ts format. For more on HLS and how to create one or more Apple HLS renditions for your Video Cloud account, see Delivering Videos with Apple HLS.

Video Cloud supports encryption of video renditions for Apple HLS, so that publishers can protect their long-form video content delivered to Apple devices via this required streaming protocol. Video Cloud HLS encryption protects content by adding AES to our standard HLS solution. When implementing encryption for Apple HLS, Video Cloud both encrypts each of the small file segments of the video, and securely delivers the files that handle rendition selection.

Supported Features

In addition to utilizing the AES specification for encrypting electronic data, Video Cloud HLS encryption further protects your content on multiple fronts including:

• Encrypts individual segment files
• Delivers the video key, an entity unique to each video, securely 
• Delivers the rendition playlist, a specially formatted file specifying the content of each rendition, securely
  
• Has no impact on video rendition files transcoded for Flash players
• Protects your content while continuing to allow for already supported features of HLS including asset migration, title cloning, asset uploads, and API support

Video Cloud also offers DRM protection for content shown in Flash Players. Both HLS Encryption and DRM protection require an additional fee. Contact your Account Manager about bundling HLS encryption and DRM protection so that you can secure your content wherever it plays.

What happens after HLS encryption implementation

Video Cloud HLS encryption delivers highly secure multiple bitrate encoding wherein each rendition and each segment of each rendition is protected in multiple ways. Your HLS encrypted videos are available for play on Apple mobile devices when the first rendition of a video is uploaded and encrypted. Once implemented, all videos uploaded thereafter will be protected using HLS encryption. Video Cloud HLS encryption adds no detectable change to playback of videos on Apple devices or in Flash players. Video Cloud HLS encryption only affects the iOS renditions of a video file. It has no impact on videos playing in Flash Players. 

Limitations

• HLS encryption applies to all HLS renditions in your account. If you have promotional or other videos you want to deliver without encryption, you can upload them to a different Video Cloud account without HLS encyption enabled.
• Video Cloud does not support encrypting HLS renditions uploaded to Video Cloud before the implementation of HLS encryption. Previously uploaded HLS content remains unencrypted. You must re-encode videos uploaded before HLS encryption to protect them.
• Video Cloud does not show an indicator to identify HLS encrypted or HLS unencrypted videos in the Media module, and does not provide a way to identify videos by HLS encryption status in the Media API.
• If a user plays an HLS encrypted video on an Apple device and then attempts to replay it after TTL has expired, playback will fail to start, and will not provide an alert message to the user. 
• If you elect to terminate Video Cloud HLS encryption, newly uploaded videos will not be protected; however, previously encrypted HLS renditions will fail to play, and will require re-encoding to play.