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by cjbos 4997 days ago
HBO and pretty much any major Network all have iOS apps.

HLS streaming can be protected, you can encrypt the chunks and decrypt on the player. Ironically enough for my previous job I built a HLS prototype solution that did exactly this... in the Flash Player.
2 comments
jiggy2011 4997 days ago
Did you find that approach to be effective at all?

If you are decrypting on the player then the decryption key must be on the clients device. What is to stop them grabbing the key from memory and ripping the stream anyway?

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cjbos 4997 days ago
Yeah, it was just a prototype to protect live video streaming on Android devices... Performance was pretty bad and so the frame rate was pretty low. I think it would work decently for desktop Flash. JW Player have a HLS plugin for Flash which is pretty good, a lot more fleshed out than my prototype ended up being.

Apple do something similar http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Networ... this approach is more secure than what we de (Restrict access to the manifest file and have Flash request the current key when needed at runtime).

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jiggy2011 4997 days ago
I can see that that could work on a locked down iOS device but a rooted android phone would surely be able to access to manifest file and make a copy of the keys and stream contents.

After all you only need one device to copy the stream and re-stream DRM free to others.

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MatthewPhillips 4997 days ago
> HBO and pretty much any major Network all have iOS apps.

What does that have to do with anything?

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