Geo-blocking

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Introduction

Motto offers geo-blocking protection rules as a way to prevent your end-users from viewing your content from regions where you may not have the rights to publish it.

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Get Started

You can get started using the Motto Studio. To enable geo-blocking, first navigate to the “Settings” section in the Motto Studio, and select the “Video protection” tab. Here you can create a new ruleset by clicking the “New ruleset” button, or edit an existing ruleset if you are already applying other protection measures to the same content. In the creation form, you can check the option to enable geo-restrictions. You can then select a list of countries that you wish to allow or disallow playback from. Make sure to apply the ruleset to the content you wish to protect by selecting the appropriate target(s). For more information, see selecting a target.

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Impact

Once geo-blocking has been turned on, your end-users in disallowed countries will no longer be able to view your playlist when attempting to play it. Instead, the stream resource will throw a 4xx HTTP status code. Motto also performs a geo-blocking check when a playlist URL is retrieved for playback, and will return an error for disallowed countries. If the Motto video player is being used, a visual error will also appear to clarify the issue to your end-users.

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EU portability laws

Motto’s geo-blocking feature is in compliance with the portability laws set forth by the European Union. Under the EU’s Portability Regulation (EU) 2017/1128, if you legally subscribe to or purchase digital video content in one EU country, you must be able to access and use that content temporarily while present in another EU country under the same conditions (e.g. catalog, quality, and functionality) as at home. Motto solves this by keeping track of the origin country of the purchase as a part of the entitlement (which is the object that grants a user access to video content based on their purchase). This origin country is then evaluated along with the IP-based location of the user, when that user tries to view that purchased piece of content. More information can be provided upon request, as needed.

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Next Steps

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

• VPN blocking
• hotlink prevention
• domain pinning
• registration walls
• entitlement verification
• DRM