Streaming Media has now become an accepted way of transmitting data for many companies and is being employed all over the world. But how do you protect your streams from prying eyes, from those who wish to steal the stream, or to lock out users at certain times? While you can password protect a website, if you don’t protect the source of the stream, an individual with a little skill can find the source path and circumvent the permissions on your website.

This is where VideoQuota comes in. According to Scott Gordon, Director of Marketing for Flicks Software, “VideoQuota is a plug-in for Windows Media Services, an application that allows Internet Content Administrators to password protect streaming video/audio as well as website membership areas. VideoQuota allows you to protect WMS media files as well as IIS directories from a single, integrated application control panel. It runs on the Windows Media Server and password protects the actual source of the Windows Media stream. The MMS protocol is what Windows media is streamed over from the Windows Media Server to the Windows Media Player.”

“Video Quota works with DRM (Digital Rights Management) and in conjunction with a company called Widevine. Widevine produces an encryption application that encrypts on the fly with basically no overhead on the stream. It sits on the media server and it monitors access to that content. And it will even go so far as to do pay-per-view and pay-per-minute.”

"You can create an account where you pay (by credit card) for access to video streams. As an example, let's say that you pay 200 cents worth into your account. You can watch no charge videos as much as you want, or you can watch a 2 cents per second video which will give you 100 seconds of viewing time, then shut you off. For more expensive programming, you would have to pay more into the account. Our software keeps track of your balance and you can even run it without a balance."