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Don't let sending screeners become a bottleneck in your sales workflow. This step usually exists outside of any rights management system, and doesn’t communicate information back to where the data is stored. As such, it causes additional strain to operations members who spend more time on manual tasks, logging into two tools to piece together results, and memory overload keeping track of what the next steps are for each screener.
All videos stored on Molten Cloud are eligible to be used for secure screeners. No matter the original format, be it ProRes, MP4, or GIF, all videos are converted into the highest quality possible in the fragmented MP4 format so they can be streamed. There are two transcoding phases, preparation and streaming. The first phase of preparation is initiated by a client when they mark a video as one they want to screen. The default status is not to create screeners, saving costs and making onboarding video more efficient. The first phase of transcoding time varies based on the length of video, but usually it takes in the order of minutes. In the second phase, or streaming, additional security comes in, in real time as a viewer is streaming the content. This innovative process saves time, space, and money by only encoding and storing the minimum amount of data needed for secure streams. First phase is just getting all the files into a consistent format (MP4). Phase 2 is to add watermark and DRM to the file. That can take a while so it gets initiated once the screener link is created. As you watch the video, we check the cache to improve speed. If a user wants to start watching immediately, real-time on-demand transcoding occurs so that you can watch it right way.
Molten Cloud offers the highest possible level of security in a screening platform for content. Privacy and security are essential to the platform’s integrity: Molten Cloud doesn’t charge for any content protection services. Multi-browser digital rights management (DRM) encryption, burned-in watermarks, time restricted access, view count restricted access, password protection, and self-expiring signed content URLs are carefully constructed safety features – they are also table stakes for Molten Cloud screeners. There are three DRM standards in use across the major browsers: Widevine, Fairplay, and Playready. We support all three. This ensures that any video streamed on the platform is encrypted in rest and transit, and cannot be downloaded in its original format. The only method of capturing the video is by taking a screen recording, but even this is debilitated by the next innovation of the Molten Cloud screening platform, burned-in watermarks.
Because of the innovation of real-time transcoding on Molten Cloud, videos can be streamed embedded with burn-in watermarks, which may be customized for each viewer in real-time, without the need to make a unique transcoded video per viewer. This invariably offers high utility without the processing and storage cost overhead. The burn-in watermarking is a more technically intensive option compared to the alternative of overlaying the watermark using HTML. In real time as a viewer is watching content Molten Cloud goes through every frame and embeds the watermark text. The user is still allowed to customize the text content, size, and position, just as with overlaid watermarks. This transcoding is done in near real time, which means users can create links with different watermarks and send them out, with the screeners instantly available. Molten Cloud maintains an on-demand video transcoding server to transcode video a few seconds ahead of where a viewer is watching and cache those video fragments in the cloud. By the time the user reaches that point in the stream, retrieval is fast. This is the only feasible way to support fully customizable burned-in watermarks, as transcoding and storing every resolution for every version of watermark text would be cost and time prohibitive.
Each link for a screener can be restricted to expire after a certain number of days, a certain number of uses, or both. The time left until expiry in both cases is shown to the content creator and viewer. If the user opts for a password protected screener link, viewers must enter the password before they get access to even the encrypted content. To prevent access to the content in the cloud after the expiration of the link, Molten Cloud proxies access to the content.
Each fragment of video is stored in cloud storage, but is not directly accessible. To access it, the video player first sends a request to the Molten API which checks access and then grants them a signed link to access the content which expires after a short period of time. This provides an additional layer of security to ensure that once the screener link expires, viewers lose access to even the encrypted content. These signed links are dynamically generated so the same link is never given out twice. Molten Cloud maintains compatibility with and offers both the DASH and HLS video manifests for all screeners, to allow third parties to build on top of our API with their own custom screener frontend interfaces.
All security parameters are verified in the backend API so they remain uncompromised. Each effort in security protects the integrity of our ecosystem, granting peace of mind to distributors as they seamlessly interchange from internal and external access to content.
Molten Cloud has had its fair share of tackling tough transcoding challenges. Take, for instance, a customer bogged down with a few hundred TB library of MOV files, which are only readily playable in the Apple universe. As a result, they are not viewable within a browser. To solve this, we pre-transcode those into MP4 so they are readily available for screeners. We offer on-demand transcoding for all our customers as needed.
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