This article is sponsored by VdoCipher
Between 2010 and 2015, Siddhant Jain and Vibhav Sinha attended IIT Delhi. During this period, before the rise of OTT (over-the-top media services), many students used it to watch pirated movies and download pirated books and courses. Their awareness of the effects of piracy grew when they saw a close friend affected by it.
“My roommate Satish used to teach chemistry every weekend for a year to class 11 and 12 students in Mathura and Delhi. When online coaching became popular, he thought of transitioning his classes online. However, he carefully kept his notes online for fear of material being leaked and distributed. was worried about sharing,” says Siddhant. Uttam India.
Satish’s fight made the two friends realize the seriousness of the situation.
“We saw that online video piracy was adversely affecting teachers like Satish when they tried to upload good content online. Many people would download these class videos and distribute them on platforms like Telegram, YouTube or WhatsApp, reaching a large audience. This situation is real. Teachers lost the opportunity to enroll new students and consequently lost income,” adds Siddhant.
Video piracy doesn’t just hurt movie and show producers; It also affects teachers and creators of educational materials. Ultimately if teachers don’t put their best content on the internet, it hurts the student community as well. According to the 2022 report Ankura Piracy StatisticsIt ranks as the third largest contributor of visits to content piracy websites, following India, the US and Russia, with more than seven billion visits.
In 2014, when they were still students, these two engineers set out on a mission to solve this problem using their video encryption technology.
Providing protection against online piracy
With a keen interest in encryption and software, Vibhav decided to combine encryption with cloud-based video players. Siddhant joined him to test the product and help with sales. They first piloted their prototype with a finance-based e-learning platform, and after some improvements, launched VdoCipher in September 2014.
VdoCipher offers highly secure DRM (Digital Rights Management) encryption — a protection that protects videos from unauthorized access — and user-based watermarking. It is combined with a smart custom video player to ensure that videos are not downloaded illegally, and viewers have a great playback experience.
“We provide security through DRM encryption and watermarking. Basically, any customer, be it an educator or an ed-tech platform, is provided with a video dashboard. They upload content to that dashboard where it’s encrypted, accessible only to authorized users. Ensuring,” says Siddhant, CEO of VdoCipher.
He adds, “On mobile phones, we can also prevent screen capture. Since this cannot be prevented on computers in all cases, we provide user-based watermarking to discourage sharing. If they choose to share the screenshot, their name/user ID will appear on the image. ; it helps us find them.”
The engineering duo claim to offer ‘Hollywood grade security’ while using technology used by Netflix and other major streaming services. Their USP is also the ability to provide this anti-piracy technology to everyone – from a small teacher taking online classes to large ed-tech companies.
“We use Google DRM encryption and Apple DRM encryption, which provide very high security. They are the tools used by Netflix, Hollywood and Bollywood movies. We were the first company in India to provide such high level security technology in an easy to use manner,” Siddhant commented. did
“This technology was not available in e-learning platforms because it was difficult to integrate. We have made it easy and accessible,” he said.
A government exam preparation course platform (UPSC and others) with over 10,000 online students and 17 centers across the country has said that their videos are being leaked because the streaming platform is not secure. In 2019, they started using VdoCipher’s service and saw a noticeable difference as more teachers trusted them. “Partnership with VdoCipher stopped video sharing and also helped us in brand building. Teachers also developed trust in our brand,” says a spokesperson of the platform.
In addition to security, VdoCipher also offers seamless streaming for slow internet connections, helping premium content reach students in Tier II and III cities. VdoCipher enables offline playback and a bunch of interactive player features on mobile to ensure a great student experience.
“Our goal is to ensure that students in any remote area of our country have access to premium video content. Poor network connectivity should not be a barrier to access to quality education,” he adds.
VdoCipher uses a usage-based pricing model where customers pay based on how much data their students or viewers use. The duo claims to have more than 3,000 paying subscribers in 100 countries, streaming more than seven million hours of content on a monthly basis. They say that while COVID has brought a boom in the ed-tech space, the need for content security is also increasing.
“We have also seen a significant increase in student attendance. This security has helped us to justify the serious students, teachers and other business stakeholders who are trying in terms of time and money,” adds the customer.
Helping teachers secure their content
In the last seven years, the journey of these 30-year-old entrepreneurs has been full of challenges. The field of security technology is constantly evolving, requiring regular software updates.
“We have had three updates in the last five years, which required us to change our software each time. Before that, we were providing the software through Flash Player. When this feature was removed from the browser, we had to completely change our technology, which took a lot of time and effort. Leo,” Siddhant explained.
As the space was relatively new in India, they faced hesitations in securing their initial funding. “But now”, they say, “there’s no looking back!” Currently, engineers are helping teachers not only in India but also in other regions like Africa.
A physical teacher from Tunisia, Africa, who launched Tunisia’s first online course platform, is one of their clients. Siddhant explains that when the teacher started using VdoCipher eight years ago, he had 200 students. Today he has more than four lakh students and 450 teachers.
Their friend Satish, who inspired VdoCipher, is now a client himself teaching chemistry to students in Haryana through his coaching classes.
Edited by Pranita Bhat