Blog: S3 Video and Audio Player For WordPress, Amazon S3 and CloudFront - Page 5 of 5 - S3 Media Vault - WordPress Plugin for Amazon S3 and CloudFront That Provides a S3 Audio Player and a S3 Video Player

How to protect download links to a digital product?

If you have a WordPress website, then what I discuss below is arguably the best way to secure your files so that they're only accessible through your website, and prevent them from being passed around and used by unauthorized users, including search engines:

1) Store your files on Amazon S3.

2) Use a WordPress plugin for Amazon S3 like S3MediaVault.com to then securely embed expiring, secure links to those media files on your WordPress site.

3) If you wish to protect the page itself (where you have the download links, or video or audio player), then use a WordPress membership plugin like DigitalAccessPass.com.

4) This is not a true Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution - so once someone downloads your Video, Audio or PDF to their computer, you no longer have control over it.

But that's OK because 99% of the abuse happens because...
a) it's not locked down,
b) because people can easily pass around links,
c) it gets mistakenly indexed in search engines,
d) someone shared it illegally in a forum, Facebook group, etc.

5) Your actual paying users/members will rarely, if ever, illegally share stuff that they've paid for. Even if they do, it may be with a friend or a family member.

6) Those who pay for any content online, usually have a good mindset and ethics. They're not going out there looking to screw you (the creator) and pirate your content like crazy and make you lose your income.

7) Don't lock it down so hard that you make things difficult for 99% of your ethical paying customers, just so you can make things difficult for the unethical, unscrupulous 1% who will try to steal from you regardless - taking screencasts, screenshots, looking in black-hat forums and warez websites for passwords and crackz etc.

8) Focus on the paying members, and giving them maximum value for their money, rather than focus on the minority of losers who will never pay for anything, and will try their best to pirate stuff.

9) Also look for advanced features like HLS True Video Streaming (which S3MediaVault.com supports) to stream your videos and make them impossible to download.

Let me know in the comments below if you have any further questions.

S3 WordPress Plugin for Amazon

By Ravi Jayagopal | S3MediaVault

S3MediaVault (S3MV) is one of the leading WordPress plugins for securely embedding your files stored on Amazon S3.

It also integrates with Amazon CloudFront - which means blazing speeds for your downloads.

The basic idea is this: Your website is not great for storing large media - like Video and Audio. Probably not even PDF files, if they will be downloaded by a large number of people at the same time.

So you basically "outsource" your media files to Amazon S3.

You upload your media files - Video, Audio, PDF, Zip & Doc files - that you need to protect, and make available only to authorized members of your membership site or online course - to Amazon S3.

But if you simply take the public link that Amazon S3 gives you and embed them in the member's area on your website, then that public link can easily be shared with other unauthorized, non-paying members, maybe even pirated by posting on a Facebook group or online forum, and now people are getting access to your secure content without even paying for it (and sometimes, without even giving you an email.

You don't want that. So you store the files on Amazon S3. And you need a piece of software that can securely connect to S3 in real-time, generate a secure, expiring link that will only work from your website, and that too only for a limited amount of time (from the time it was generated).

And you want it all to be automated. And you want it to be easy to upload files to your Amazon S3 account. You want to easily manage all of your files on S3, and you want to be able to delete unused files.

And that's where S3MediaVault comes in.

S3MediaVault is a WordPress plugin that can connect to your Amazon S3 account (once you give it the proper secret and public keys from your AWS account), generate secure links to your video, audio, pdf and other files, and embed them on any page of your choice, in the member's area of your website.

And then, it lets you add "Amazon CloudFront" integration on top of it, so that your media files become downloadable at blazing fast speeds.

And S3MediaVault can create beautiful Video players for your video files, Audio players for your Audio files, and downloadable links for your PDF files. So it can protect all of your files, and also make it easy to consume.

Please leave a question, comment or suggestion below in the comments section.

Also, don't forget to watch the videos on the home page at S3MediaVault.com.