It’s not rocket science, but it’s not pre-school either.  Here are a few things to be aware of when preparing to deliver mobile video.  Everything from formats, resolutions, bitrates and delivery methods.

Devices

Blackberry, Palm, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android… Your audience may be coming to you on any one of these devices. So how do you decide which device to produce content for?  It’s not easy.  Fortunately with every new generation of mobile device, more and more standards are set.  There is almost 1 certainty now, all of these devices will play a 3GP or MP4 formatted video.

Not all devices are equal however.  Each one of these phones has a different resolution screen and runs on different provider networks.  Although, all the major cell providers now support 3G in most parts of the country, 3G is not readily available.  Also, 3G speeds vary from provider to provider and from location to location.  You can not count on your audience being able to support a 768Kbps stream.   Also some mobile users will be watching on a WiFi connected device which means they could support higher bit rates.

So what do you do then?  There are some packages out there which will supply device detection and then you can redirect the request to an appropriately formatted version of the video.  There are some hardware devices out there which will encode the video on the fly (Ripcode) this could allow you to have one high quality version and then re-encode it as needed.  You could also just build for the lowest common denominator and hope for the best.

What ever method you choose, you need to remember that to get a high quality video you don’t need a very high bit rate since you are watching this on a small screen.

Delivery Apps

Some companies are designing specifically for the iPhone since statistics show that 80% of all mobile Internet usage comes from the iPhone.  Obviously YouTube was right out of the gates with a special iPhone app.  There are some other iPhone apps lilke mDialog which caters to Indi and foreign films.  If wouldn’t take much to write an iPhone app which basically browses a database of avilable videos and then plays them through the iPhone video player/QuickTime player.  This is a simple and elegant solution.  It can brand your content and keep visitors coming back for more.

You could also write an app specific for the BlackBerry and Android (G1) and feel confident that you’ve got you bases covered.  Also since your visitors will be using an app specific to a device you can direct them to a specially formatted version of the video for that device.

Normal Website Video Delivery

So you don’t have the resources to develop a device specific app?  That’s ok.  You can build a webpage specifically for mobile devices, you can even get a .mobi domain if you want.  The trick here will be to format your video to support the largest range of devices or ask your visitors to choose a link for their device.  As I mentioned before you can also use device detection software to figure out what kind of device is visiting you page.

How to encode and format my videos

As we discussed 3GP and MP4 are the widest supported formats amongst mobile devices.  So choose a format you’re comfortable with and start encoding!  Use this table to help you gauge screen resolutions

• iPhone 480×320
• Blackberry Storm  480×320
• Blackberry Bold 480×320
• Blackberry Curve 480×360
• Blackberry Perl Flip 240×320
• TMobile G1 – 480×320
• Samsung Jack 320×240
• Palm Trio pro 320×320
• HTC Touch Pro 480×640
• Palm Pre 320×480

The worst thing that will happen if you produce a video in the wrong resolution is the image may become distorted when displayed on the phone.  It won’t be the end of the world, but if it’s paid content you will probably have to insure that the right video is being delivered for the right phone, so choose wisely.

Streaming vs Progressive Download

Chances are you don’t have a Darwin Streaming Server or a Flash Media Server at your disposal.  A CDN or specialized service will have access to this type of server.  You could certainly install your own, but make sure you have the bandwidth to deliver to a mass audience.  Be careful considering Flash as delivery method today.  There is limited Flash support on phones, most don’t support it, including the iPhone!  If you stream via Flash Media Server then you must have a Flash player, you can not point a browser to a .FLV and .F4V file and expect it to play.  Your best option for streaming today is to use a Darwin (QuickTime) streaming server, it can stream 3GP and MP4 files as well as MOV files.  You need to be careful about streaming higher bit rate videos to a mobile device.  If you get a device on an Edge, 2G network, or older PCS network then it may not be able to support more than 256Kbps or so.  Only a true 3G connection and good one at that would be able to support a 768kbps or higher bit rate.

So you should consider a progressive download delivery instead.  This way no matter what connection the end user has, the video can be delivered.  But consider this, a 50MB video delivered at 256Kbps will take approximately 27 minutes to download, will your audience stay that long?  I would recommend using a well connected CDN to deliver your mobile content to ensure that the file gets to the device as quickly as possible.

For more information on the differences between HTTP Progressive download and Streaming click here

Conclusion

I hope this short briefing is enough to encourage you to start pushing out mobile content.  Since mobile devices are simply a wireless computer and since mobile browsers are getting better and better you don’t need to worry too much about how to deliver a video.  You just need to ensure your content is in the right format and bit rate to allow maximum exposure.

If you have any questions about this topic, please feel free to post them here and I will respond.

Thanks,

Mike Colburn (DigitalMediaGuy)

Stopping content thieves from taking your Flash video content requires a little extra work and some resources.  If you follow these guidelines, then your content won’t show up on PirateBay or YouTube.

There are lots of applications and plug-ins out there to allow you to capture video streams off the Internet.  It’s so easy that you may think there is no way to protect your content at all.  The following with give you some advice on how to protect your videos and sleep better at night.  You’re going to employ some extra services or buy some software, but if your content is valuable then it’s worth the investment

Protecting Windows Media content has been fairly easy for quite some time.  You can use the Windows Media DRM suite which will attach a digital certificate to the WMV file and require an active and valid cert to be downloaded in order to watch the video.  Although this system isn’t fool proof, it’s pretty strong and will stop most people dead in their tracks.  Microsoft is gearing up to roll out PlayReady which will plug the holes up in WM DRM.  It fully supports Silverlight in both Windows and Mac OS, and will be easy to use (so they say).  Look for a full deployment of PlayReady this summer.

But how do you protect Flash videos, specifically FLV, F4V, and MP4?  If you deliver your content via progressive download, then there will be little chance you can stop someone from taking that video from you with little effort.  Progressive download is literally downloading the file to the end user PC.  Where’s the protection?

There is no technology today to add DRM to the file itself.  Although there are some services out there that will offer something like that, they typically require you to use their proprietary Flash player in order to protect the content, who wants to do that?

So that leaves us with one option, protect the delivery of the video.  You may immediately think you can just stream the video using a Flash Media Server or Wowza server.  Think again.  Products like Replay Media Capture can snatch that stream right up.  What you need to do is stream the video using a Flash Media Server using RTMPE instead of RTMP.  You also need to disable RTMP from the server all together.  Adobe had a security warning about this awhile back.  Leaving RTMP on, allows for a back door.  RTMPE will encrypt the stream during delivery makeing it very difficult to de-compile and capture.

Are we done yet?  Nope, I’m just getting started…  What’s to prevent someone from discovering your stream name and then embedding that in their own Flash player?  You need to use SWF verification.  SWF verification will will ensure that the SWF playing the video is your SWF and not someone elses.  Again, you will need Flash Media Server to do this with.

Are we done now?  Not quite.  You’ll be delivering your SWF via HTTP to the browser, so it wouldn’t be too hard to locate that file and WGET it.  Now I have your player I can play it all I want.  What do you do now?  Use a Token based authentication with a time expiring URL.  These schemes usually use a MD5 128-Encrypted hash.  What will happen is, a unique URL will be used to play the video each and every time someone visits your site.  The URL will pass a token back to a secure server proving that the hash is authentic.  Then an time expire value is appended to the URL that will expire that link in a matter of seconds or a minute.  Nothing too long.  Access to the link is the only thing expiring, not the content.  So as long as the person has started watching the video with in that time frame, there is no problem even if the video is 2 hours long.  If they need to re-watch it, then they visit the site again and get a new URL.

All of this sounds like a lot of hassle and expense, is there an easier way?  If you deliver your videos through a CDN who uses FMS, then they probably offer all these services, you won’t have to incur any of these expenses.  Try a company called Influxis, they host FMS servers and you can setup a FMS how ever you want with minimal cost.

For a higher end solution, check out WideVine.  Widevine uses some proprietary technology which goes beyond what I’ve mentioned here.  Widevine’s intuitive DRM management tools offer total control over the encryption, key management, distribution and consumption of digital media. Using Widevine Cypher, pre-configured policies, digital rights and encryption are applied to inbound assets, automatically registered with Widevine and the CMS, then uploaded to a destination partner network or CDN.  Just know, that WideVine doesn’t come cheap!

I hope this information is useful for you.  Like all security on a computer, as soon as you plug a hole, another one is dug.  The goal is to stay one step ahead of the bad guys.

Thanks,

Mike Colburn (DigitalMediaGuy)