How to Protect Videos on Amazon S3 with Expiring Links (Urls)…

Viddymatic has Amazon S3 hotlinking protection built-in!

“What the hell does that mean?”

Well, with a ‘standard’ S3 setup, ‘everyone’ can read your files  – which allows people to come to your website and watch videos (or other media) that you store in your Amazon S3 bucket.

That’s what you want, right?…

Sure - but it also means that others can ‘share’ the link to your video (or other files) in places you might not want them to.

And remember: every time that video gets downloaded or watched from your S3 account, you are the one paying for it!

What many Amazon S3 users don’t realise is that it’s possible to prevent access to files in your bucket unless it’s from your own web site(s). This gives you control over which websites your videos get watched from…but it does require some technical expertise.

Viddymatic has that expertise built in…

…which means you can heavily reduce the effect of money-sapping bandwidth thieves without lifting a finger!

Live Amazon S3 Protection Demo:

The video below live on a protected bucket and uses Viddymatic’s S3 expiring links feature.

So, you can play and watch the video (or even download it) from this page, but you wouldn’t be able to share the link to the video itself on another website or access it directly, because  it requires an ‘access key’ that automatically expires after a time limit that you decide on (which is what Viddymatic sorts out invisibly in the background):

Here’s the actual direct link to the video file that’s being used – when you try to access it (just click it) you’ll get an error. That’s because it’s protected…

…What Viddymatic does seemlessly behind the scenes  is provide temporary access to it ONLY on this web page – which is why the Viddymatic video above works perfectly!

http://media.viddymatic.com.s3.amazonaws.com/preview.flv

Protect MORE than just videos!

You can actually use Viddymatic in a WordPress ‘members area’ (for example), or in protected posts, to give protection to ANY type of file in your S3 buckets.

That means you can limit access to pdfs (Adobe’s digital document format), exe files, zip files, and pretty much anything else you darn well like! All from just using the Viddymatic control panel