Last week, the “Russian Internet technologies” conference took place, where we presented our experience working with streaming video and protecting video content.

A fairly large portion of our projects have to do with storing and publishing video content on the Internet. One of the many questions our clients often ask is the question of protecting content from illegal reproduction and distribution. There’s a wide-spread belief that there exist programs and technologies which are capable of guaranteeing that the copying and redistribution of licensed content is impossible. In reality, these software only gives off the impression that is possible.

In our presentation, we sought to discuss existing technologies, their vulnerabilities, and free, open-source equivalents which grant the same level of protection as proprietary and very expensive products.
In particular, we showed that popular “protected” video streaming protocols, like RTMPE, don’t guarantee the protection of content from illegal copying. No existing DRM system can simply provide 100% protection.
As an alternative to expensive and often limited content-protection systems, a series of simple techniques were suggested which would offer the same level of security.

Our presentations can be viewed here.

A couple of months ago we started experimenting with Balsamiq Mockups. It’s a compact and very simple program with which to build wire-frame models of user interfaces. By way of example, below is one of the screens that we have drawn using it in Russian.

When we started to experiment with Balsamiq I could not have imagined how much this program would affect our development process and how many radical changes it would bring.
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