Is there any disadvantage of using URL expiring concept to protect online videos?
+2
A:
You're stopping your users from usefully bookmarking the URLs to get back to them later (thus, making life harder for your users), and stopping your users from mailing, tweeting or otherwise usefully sending the URLs of your best videos to their friends, so basically killing any chance that the videos may "go viral" and attract large number of viewers. In other words, you're working totally against the growing "social" component of the web world, as well as making your users' experience less pleasant and useful.
If you want to "protect" a URL e.g. against visits from users who aren't registered with your service, why not use the HTTP authentication mechanisms and/or cookies handled out and processed at application level in correspondence with registration and login? It seems to me that such approaches, if you do need protection, can have fewer issues than "expiring URLs".
Alex Martelli
2010-03-06 07:03:13
thanks Alex. Actually I wanted to use Expiring URL concept to protect video from being downloaded.
jose
2010-03-06 07:09:47
@Auxi, IMNSHO, if a video can be reliably streamed, it can be downloaded (by anybody with sufficient technical savvy) -- when I meet a video site which (probably by uselessly trying to ensure I don't download) makes the streaming flaky, I simply give up on that site forever (there are many other video sites that have given up the attempt to fight against their users, not worth my time and energy to use a site that is _still_ trying to fight -- I just go elsewhere, it's SO easy).
Alex Martelli
2010-03-06 07:18:44