Hotlink prevention

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Introduction

When streaming into Motto without any additional video protection rules configured, your stream will be exposed over the internet via a static URL, e.g. https://example.com/master.m3u8. Such a static URL is convenient when wanting to distribute your stream to a large audience easily, but it also has clear downsides. What if your content is only meant for a specific group of end-users, e.g. ones that have paid for access? While we offer a feature for entitlement checking, you may also want to disallow end-users to share the stream URLs with others, beyond the confines of your platform (i.e. hotlinking).

To prevent abuse, the hotlink prevention feature generates a unique stream URL for each individual end-user based on their IP address. When they share this with others on a different network, the stream will simply not play.

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Get Started

Currently, hotlink prevention is available through the API; the Studio will be updated soon to support this feature.

To enable hotlink prevention, you need to follow these steps:

1. Create a video protection ruleset with the disallow_hotlinking property set to true.
2. Attach a video to the ruleset you created in step 1. You can attach as many videos as you’d like to a single ruleset, so you do not have to create a new ruleset for each video.

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Impact

Once this feature has been turned on, end users switching between IP addresses will may no longer be able to load your stream when attempting to play it. Instead, the stream resource will throw a 4xx HTTP status code.

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Next Steps

Have a look at any of the other rights protection features that Motto offers:

• Geo-blocking
• VPN blocking
• domain pinning
• entitlement verification
• DRM