Transcription
When I was a young man, I knew it was wrong to illegally download all of those episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm from BitTorrent FlashForward to Today. And I’m on the other side of the fence. I build membership sites for clients, and it’s my job to keep those file sharing monsters from illegally downloading my clients courses and then redistributing them to hordes of free loading slackers. But hey, how big a problem is this really? Well, it’s big enough for Google to develop wide vine DRM, the solution that none other than Netflix, Hulu, and yes, Larry David’s own HBO have chosen as their DRM platform to protect the billions of dollars they spend on creating content.
Now. Sure, it would be nice to be able to protect the files on my clients membership sites with that same top shelf encryption, but if you want to get that level of protection, you need to take CWIP training or certified widevine implementation partner training, obviously, so then you can confidentially and successfully install and configure widevine systems for clients. Well, that is, until today. Those glorious taco loving sumos have brought us Video Cipher, a video player with, well, let’s face it, one reason to use it it provides widevine DRM when you play a video through it. I mean, sure, the player is great.
It actually works really well on my iPhone, something that vooPlayer has struggled with. Uploading a video is really easy. Just hit the upload button, choose the file you like. Of course, you can also link up to Dropbox or Google Drive as well. The video will upload and go into a processing mode just as you find on YouTube.
During processing, the file is being encoded for playback on multiple device types. When the video is ready for playback, video Cipher will send you an email to let you know. For me, it only took a few minutes. Now, this is a good time to talk about file size. With the AppSumo deal, we get 20GB of storage.
But remember that your files will be duplicated multiple times for iOS and Android and other resolutions. So to put some concrete numbers to this, I uploaded my recent WP time capsule review, which came in at 637.9 megabytes. After it completed uploading to Video Cipher, it had used 1.1gb of storage, almost double. Let’s talk about bandwidth. You also get a 150GB of bandwidth, and that’s not per month.
That’s lifetime never renewing. Now, hold up. Like you’re probably feeling in this moment, I too was offended when I read that offering. I mean, this is an Ltd. I want terabytes of free bandwidth every month.
Well, no, actually I don’t. See, bandwidth and storage have recurring cost to them. So for Video Cipher to stick around for the long term, they can’t be paying our collective bandwidth bills for the next decade instead. I love this plan because it actually shows the founders can maintain a profitable business without having to constantly acquire new Ltd customers. They’ve given us 20GB of storage for life and 150GB of bandwidth.
But when that bandwidth runs out, it’s dry. And I actually buy more or give them money. Now, this isn’t some podunk hosting. This is Amazon Cloudron, one of the fastest, most reliable CDNS on the Internet. So Video Cipher is going to make money by reselling cloudron at a markup.
Extra storage is priced at bandwidth is. Yep, that’s a markup of almost double. But heck, if I can pay an extra dime and have someone else take care of providing the cutting edge file encryption and even a short code to embed the video on my website, I say it’s worth it. Getting the videos on my WordPress site was super easy. I just installed the video cipher plugin, and then I used the shortpixel supplied in the video cipher dashboard.
I had to connect it with an API secret key. And then there were some really basic options to set up, like the default resolution. And if I wanted to add a watermark, I could configure it right there. Of course, you can also deploy your videos via a script or an iframe if WordPress isn’t quite your bag. There’s also some built in analytics, but I didn’t have enough data or time to actually try that out.
What’s really missing here is any way to actually style the player itself so that you can add your own unique brand colors or have a unique play and pause button. I guess vooPlayer still wins when it comes to marketing features, but what about actually protecting your content? Well, I tried two chrome extensions. One was called Video Stream Downloader, and another was called video Downloader Professional, as well as an Ltd I got in stack socialbee about a year ago called Pool tube. Now, pulltube I tested first, and it displayed an error.
Video downloader professional found no videos on the page, but Video stream Downloader it found the video defeated. Hardly. The files that it downloaded were only nine megabytes in size. Remember, this was over 600 megabytes. And when I tried to play back the video, it was simply a gray screen.
Well, nicely done. Video cipher. So while I’d love to see them enhance their video player with some styling options and maybe add a chrome extension for easy access to those embed codes, video Cipher works as advertised. Now, I admit I bought this deal to review it and then return it, but now I’m not quite so sure. $79 seemed like a pretty fair price to pay for a player of this caliber.
Now, considering that I only need to pay for storage and bandwidth, I think that’s a fantastic option for anyone who’s actually serious about online courses. No, you don’t need this if you’ve never sold a course before. But if you already have a profitable online course business, or if you’re making content that people are actually thinking about stealing, well, then Video Cipher might just be the antidote to your problems. So in conclusion, I give video cipher a 9.2 out of ten. Nicely done.
If this review has been helpful to you and you’d like to go on and make a purchase, I’d appreciate it if you click that link in the description. That is our referral link and it does kick us back a little bit of change over here at the channel. If you like this video, make sure you hit that button. More reviews to come this week, so get subscribed, turn on those notifications and be sure to check out the that ltd life community over on Facebook links in the description. I’ll see you in the next review.
