How to protect your lesson videos from downloading and leaks

Protect your videos in 6 steps

1. 1

   Upload paid lessons to the platform itself

   Each lesson on Snatr is either a video you upload or a YouTube link. Uploaded video is what gets encrypted, so make every paid lesson an upload and keep YouTube links for free teaching.

2. 2

   Keep the preview to one lesson

   A free lesson on the course page persuades students to buy, but anyone can watch it. Choose a lesson that shows how you teach, not the most important one in the course.

3. 3

   Never send the video file itself

   A file sent on WhatsApp, Telegram or Drive leaves your hands for good. Send the link to the course on your site, and the student signs in with their own account.

4. 4

   Tell students their name is on the video

   A moving watermark carries the student's name, a short code and your logo. A student who knows their name will show on any recording thinks twice before posting it.

5. 5

   Close the account that leaks

   If you know who leaked, you can block their sign-in at any time or remove them from the course, and they can no longer open its lessons.

6. 6

   Keep free teaching on public YouTube

   Put what you want to spread on public YouTube to bring in new students, and keep what you sell on the platform only. Then nobody needs to hunt for a leaked copy of your free lessons.

Where do videos leak from?

Most leaks are not hacking. They are simple things that happen every day, each with a different fix:

What does encryption actually do?

Uploaded video is split into segments and encrypted, and the decryption key goes to the decryption module inside the browser, never to the page. Download tools can fetch every segment, but cannot decrypt them, because none of them work with that module.

It was measured: the same files decode to noise without the key (10.6 dB against the original) and to the original video with it (59.9 dB).

• Video protection in detail

What the watermark does, and what it does not

The watermark is a deterrent. It shows on an ordinary screen recording with the student's name, which makes posting the video awkward for them, so most students do not.

But it is not proof you can rely on. Someone technical can remove it from the page in seconds before recording. So do not build your protection on the watermark alone.

Students on iPhone and iPad

Safari and iOS have no decryption module the platform can serve, so they watch a second copy encrypted in a simpler way (AES-128). Ready-made download tools fail there too, but in that copy the key reaches the player itself, so a determined person can extract it.

The browser is what says it has no decryption module, and there is no way to verify that, so anyone who knows the copy exists can ask for it. The platform marks and logs those sessions and paces their keys, so collecting a lesson through it takes as long as watching it.

What protection does not cover

• Screen recording works on computers and phones, and filming the screen with another phone always works.
• Lessons with a YouTube link are not protected, because the video is not on the platform.
• PDF files attached to a lesson are not encrypted like video, and students can download them.
• Live classes carry a watermark but are not encrypted like uploaded video.

• The full security page