Amazon RTMP S3 vs Vimeo PRO vs Wistia? (Download Protection)

[vmialik]

Context: A membership site, focused on a Russian market which is known to culturally pirate everything they see. Granted: ultimately you cannot hide video as a person can take a screen-capture/video camera method ultimately.

1. Having said that. Is it still worth going the RTMP S3 route? Vs say Vimeo and Wistia. Will it help a bit or its a technology that is dying?

2. Also with Vimeo PRO vs Wistia generally Vimeo is better value, but how is their analytics compared to Wistia (per user stats) if possible?

3. Vimeo is a very popular, therefore downloaded 3rd party apps exist plentifully, is Wistia's platform unique to Vimeo in terms of its embed format if its same format this means that the commonly available tools as for Vimeo will work for Wistia, how ever if its different, and less popular as RTMP S3 is in this case less tools are available for it. Is that the case for Wistia?

[vmialik]

Ok in this case our plan of action is to start with S3 and build a culture of protecting the content, atleast for a regular folk.  After a while if analytics and tracking is of importance we will convert the necessary videos to Wistia.  At least thats the plan so far.

Thanks for the input Phil.

I'm still open to other experiences with video anti-piracy for membership sites. Thanks community!

[PhilNottingham]

1. As you say, If you're that concerned about privacy - then you shouldn't make the video available online. It's extremely difficult/nigh-on impossible to stop those who want to pirate something from pirating it; so if you're that bothered, my advice would be don't put the video online.

That said...

RTMP S3 will likely be more secure for you than Vimeo or Wistia, because anyone who researches the way those platforms structure their URLS and unique codes will probably be able to figure out a download link and pull out the content.

2. Wistia's analytics is WAY better, plus it can integrate with GA.

3. Wistia has a ton of tools, called "Labs" and the platform is much more flexible than vimeo in terms of the functionality and embed style. A lot of third party apps will work with both platforms, but it really depends what specifically you're looking to do.

For my money, Wistia is much better than Vimeo Pro across the board, with a much better toolset - but Vimeo Pro is extremely cheap. Ultimately, if you can afford Wistia, I'd go with that.

[customerparadigm.com]

Vadim -

There was a thread yesterday about Wistia vs. You Tube here: http://moz.com/community/q/wbf-videos-and-transcripts

… and they linked to this page about how video with Wistia vs. YouTube affects SEO: http://wistia.com/learning/advanced-seo-with-distilled

That said, you're correct that there's nothing stopping someone from using a video capture system to grab the images.

Perhaps a watermark on the video could help prevent this temptation?

I'm not a huge Vimeo expert, but I know that Wistia is what Moz uses...