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How Much Security is Enough?

Online Content Protection Examined.

With research firms migrating many of their core activities online, the open nature of the Internet becomes a double edged sword. While it's a strong selling point for online research that anyone, anywhere, can readily access information through a web browser, that same ability makes it difficult to ensure the security of any information placed online. This is particularly problematic with new product and entertainment research.

A recent security leak in online testing within the film industry has spooked the whole of the community into keeping their testing of movie trailers completely offline for the time being.

Many research and technology companies claim to offer completely secure media delivery technologies, and while many of these technologies often incorporate innovative content protection schemes, most, if not all, can be broken, leaving content to be downloaded, distributed and experienced by unintentional audiences. In cases where there is a breach of security, the viral nature of the Internet becomes a liability to competitive advantage.

Fully appreciating the sensitive nature of certain media files, Vision Critical offers IdeaSafe as its tool for protecting the delivery of online content to our clients' panelists. IdeaSafe secures media to prevent respondents from taking screenshots of an image or video; it also prevents respondents from decrypting files and distributing them to friends and family.

Vision Critical's current version of IdeaSafe works well to protect images and video, but we're currently working on creating a streaming version of IdeaSafe to allow for immediate viewing of videos, while keeping these videos secure from screen captures and extraction from the browser cache - this is the place on your computer where all the files you see on the web reside. When Streaming IdeaSafe is ready for market, it will allow our clients to simply upload a video file to Panel+ and securing that content with the click of a button.

Streaming IdeaSafe is currently in beta testing; this new version of IdeaSafe is built to use Windows Media Video and Macromedia Shockwave. The combination of these technologies allows Vision Critical to offer our clients a fast and secure way of delivering media files to panelists.

Posted on June 26, 2005
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