[sangohan]

This may be the first in a tiny series of posts. I'm helping a non profit setup a network where they can send live streaming lectures and communicate primarily via iChat/iSight's videoconferencing. As with any interest group, we have rivals who are always nosing our communications...

- How easy/likely would it be for someone to be able to rip and record our live lecture stream? (We'd like to anyone public to be able to view our live stream, but we don't want anyone to download/rip/edit our streams.) To me, it seems EASY. I mean, in QT Pro, you can just save streams, right? And regular users can just find the url in their activity log. What am I missing here? How do I protect my public live streams from being recorded?
- How easly/likely is it for someone to rip and record our iChat video conversations?
- What security measures are best to take? Is it necessary for us to own our own iChat server? (do iChat servers just log/route text only or do they run the video as well? If video is "served" by the video chatter's personal computer then there's no advantage, is there?) Is it ridiculous to think that we can prevent the recording of our public live lectures? Is it necessary for me to use Streaming Server to server the live video lectures to just private users only?

I know it's basic stuff, but I appreciate your help. Any general advice/experience/opinions on QT Broadcaster/Streaming Server/iChat Server are appreciated. Or any other creative solutions. Thanks in advance.

Next up will probably be questions on specific bandwidth and server advice...

[sangohan]

bump

[ghporter]

If I'm not mistaken iChat/iSight is a point-to-point connection, so it would be fairly difficult to "quick and easy" intercept a connection. On the other hand, it's always possible to "slick and stealthy" intercept just about any connection-it just depends on how much effort the third party is interested in putting into the issue. You should be able to encrypt your traffic using something like GPG, which is robust and fairly easy to set up and use, and that would make the theoretical third party's effort useless.