Collaboration has always been a key theme at EditShare and since our launch back in 2004 we have worked hard to enable editors to share both media files as well as NLE projects. After all, making films and videos is usually a group effort, and the whole process is much more efficient when everyone on a production team can work from the same common canvas. That’s why over the years we have developed our own sharing solutions and we have also supported any native sharing capabilities that are baked into the various NLE applications.
So naturally we are very excited about Adobe’s new “Productions” feature that gives editors the best Premiere Pro “project sharing” experience ever.
I am pleased to report that over the past two months, EditShare has been testing a beta version of this new feature, and this very significant upgrade for Premiere Pro users does indeed work flawlessly with our EFS shared storage.
“Project Sharing” is a rather broad term, and for those of you who may not be familiar with the concept, I thought it might be helpful to explain it in some detail, so that you can appreciate the somewhat different approaches taken by NLE developers.
Project sharing is a collaboration system that divides up larger non-linear editing (NLE) projects into smaller mini projects, each of which represents a part of the whole. For instance, if a group of editors and assistants is editing a large documentary, they might create individual mini projects for “Rushes”, “Assemblies”, “The Show Open”, “Act 1”, “Act 2”, “Act 3”, “Conclusion”, “Fine Cut”, “Effects”, “Sound Mix”, etc.
As soon as a user opens up one of these mini projects with write access, Premiere Pro creates a “prlock” file next to the project file, effectively “locking” that project to ensure that other Premiere Pro editors on the same project are automatically flagged to open the mini project as read-only, so that they can’t overwrite or corrupt someone else’s work in any way.
When the user with write permission closes the project, the prlock file goes away and now the project becomes available for editing by another user. The system allows users to see each other’s work and collaborate safely. Avid has had a similar sharing feature for a long time, called “bin locking”, and it has been widely used for big projects that require large scale collaboration. In the Avid environment, bins are files on disk inside a project folder, so it’s possible to set permission on each bin file independently. In Premiere Pro, bins are virtual folders inside projects – so you have to do the locking at the level of an entire project file.
EditShare was the original pioneer of “project locking” for non-Avid NLEs back in 2009. Our objective was to enable editors to collaborate in a similar way to Avid but using Final Cut Pro 7 and Premier. At the time, the capabilities were not available in either Apple or Adobe. So we developed our own concept of dividing projects into multiple mini projects (it was mind shift in the way editors needed to think about their projects) and then we created two different systems for ensuring that only one user at a time could get write access to a project.
In our first system, we stored Final Cut Pro 7 and Premiere Pro project files in “User folders” to ensure that only that user had write access to anything inside, and we provided a way to move project files between user folders.
In our second system, we made an automated way to change permissions on a project file as soon as a user opened it, so only that user could write to the project. These were pretty effective solutions to the collaboration problem. But they weren’t native to the applications and couldn’t support some of the features that are desirable in project sharing.
Adobe introduced its own version of project sharing in 2017, but it had some drawbacks. For example, each user had to enable “project locking” in their own project settings. If one user forgot, projects could get locked for some users but not for others.
And one user couldn’t open another user’s sequence and copy a small part of their timeline into their own project, because Premiere wouldn’t let them set in and out points on a timeline from a read-only project. Users had to import the entire sequence into their own project, which also resulted in every clip of the sequence getting imported into their own project space. This wasn’t ideal.
Adobe listened to user feedback and came back with a massively improved method for project sharing, called Productions.
With the new feature, when the first user creates a “Production”, this makes a top-level folder inside which everyone now puts their related projects. Just beneath the Productions folder, you also get some master settings files – specifying things like the location for media and scratch folders. Every Premiere Pro project created inside the Production will now inherit these same settings – so you get total continuity across all parts of the project.
Perhaps most significant, you can now copy small sections of sequences from one project and paste them into other projects, without unwanted clips being copied to the destination project.
Premiere Pro projects created inside a Production also understand the relationship between projects, and what items came from where. So, if you match frame on a clip that was copied from another project, and then reveal the file for the match frame, Premiere will open up the original project where the clip was located – just like Avid does with bins. Adobe has even added a feature that notifies editors when a project opened as read-only has been updated by a read-write user, prompting the read-only user to refresh their view of the project to make the latest changes visible.
The new Productions feature is a major improvement for users of Premiere Pro and we are excited to see this built into Adobe’s editing product. Best of all for EditShare users, we have tested this new feature extensively with EditShare EFS storage and can assure our customers that Adobe’s new method of project sharing works flawlessly with our native Windows and macOS file system client.
EditShare EFS + Premiere Pro continues to be a winning combination!
For a sneak preview of how we support this new feature, visit us at NAB 2020 or contact us at sales@editshare.com.
04 MAR 2020
EditShare leans in with open and secure solutions – cloud-based capabilities and comprehensive APIs power advanced workflows and extensive media ecosystems
Boston, MA – March 4, 2020 – EditShare® invites NAB 2020 attendees to join us at booth SL7920 for workflow demonstrations and theater presentations that showcase how EditShare scale-out shared storage and collaborative media management solutions – EFS and FLOW – simplify the process of storytelling. EditShare’s open solutions and extensive set of APIs support an ecosystem of partners enabling storytellers to utilize their preferred tools to build production workflows that seamlessly and securely connect individual creators and entire workgroups across cities, countries and continents.
“Our customers want an open, secure platform that will work from day one with the creative tools they use day in and day out. They want the flexibility to configure their media infrastructure either on-premise, hybrid or in the cloud, with capabilities to customize or spin up an entirely new workflow at any time. Simply put, they want to be liberated from legacy infrastructure that limits their creative freedom and business options,” states Conrad Clemson, CEO, EditShare. “EditShare solutions are ruthlessly open. They remove boundaries, jump time zones and enable customers to collaborate with the tools they want – and whoever they want – to create incredible stories. We look forward to meeting with our customers and partners at NAB 2020 to share the incredible new innovations, partnerships and programs that enable us to create amazing together.”
New EFS and FLOW technology innovation highlights shown on the EditShare NAB booth include end-to-end production in the cloud, deeper integration with creative tools like Adobe® Premiere® Pro to enable advanced, collaborative editorial workflows, and practical applications of AI to enrich archives.
FLOW 2020: The Foundation of Your Workflow
FLOW 2020 manages the entire media technology stack. It tracks and supervises asset movement across tiered storage environments including on-premise, nearline, object storage and cloud. In addition to showcasing the wide range of cloud workflows and full-featured panel support for tight integration with Adobe Premiere Pro and other creative tools, EditShare will demonstrate practical applications of AI within the FLOW environment, including the ability for users to index and organize thousands of hours of video content, eliminating manual logging while standardizing content indexing for richer search capabilities.
EFS 2020: The Industry’s Most Resilient and Scalable Media Optimized File System
EFS 2020 powers faster EditShare storage nodes and networks on-premise, in the cloud and in hybrid configurations. Fully compatible with FLOW 2020, EFS 2020 enables media organizations to build extensive collaborative workflows, shielding creative personnel from the underlying technical complexity while equipping technical teams with a comprehensive set of media management tools. The media-optimized file system features security improvements at every layer and enhanced throughput performance gains across the board. In addition to the powerful storage management tools built into EFS, our extensive set of RESTful APIs opens the door for customers and technology partners to automate advanced storage management workflows in a secure environment.
EditShare NAB Theater – The Latest Trends and Technologies
In addition to demonstrations of EFS 2020 and FLOW 2020 capabilities and workflows attendees can join us for presentations in the EditShare theater covering the following industry trends and technology topics:
Remote Productions: On Ramp to The Cloud
The EditShare cloud presentations will share how real-life productions can utilize the cloud to unleash new, flexible, on-demand workflows to fit a range of different production needs. In addition to learning how Editshare is helping organizations move their productions into the cloud during the EditShare theater presentations, attendees can learn even more about EditShare cloud capabilities in the NAB Conference. EditShare CSO Andy Liebman and CTO Stephen Tallamy will present “The On Ramp to Video Production in the Cloud – How Openness, AI and Security Will Facilitate Better Storytelling Workflows” on Wednesday, April 22nd at 2:20pm PDT in Room N258 at the LVCC.
Advanced APIs: The Power of Openness
EditShare’s extensible platforms feature advanced APIs, supporting the integration of a wide range of industry solutions and an even wider range of customizable workflows. Theater presentations in cooperation with several industry partners will highlight the use of EditShare’s powerful and publicly available APIs to manage thousands of users and enable mass collaboration while maintaining fine-grain control over media and projects.
Security Best Practices: Keeping Content Safe and Creativity Flowing
EFS auditing puts a digital fingerprint on every file, from inception through to delivery. Unlike other auditing approaches, EFS auditing is designed for media intensive productions and does not impact the real-time operations or creative workflow. It meets the highest standards set out by widely recognized security guidelines from the media and entertainment space. Auditing delivers peace of mind to facilities dealing with highly valuable and sensitive content. Attendees can learn more about these and other important security capabilities during EditShare theater presentations.
Moving Media Professionals Ahead with EditShare Certification
EditShare Academy encompasses all stakeholders and constituencies from engineering and support to marketing, sales and administrators to the team that ships EditShare products and the creative and talented customers who use them. EditShare will have members of its customer success team on hand to discuss how EditShare Academy empowers our employees, partners, and customers with comprehensive knowledge enabling success at every step and at every skill level.
Meet with EditShare at NAB 2020
Attendees to NAB 2020 can book a meeting with the EditShare team at:
https://editshare.live/nab2020pr
About EditShare
Editshare is a technology innovator in media engineered storage and advanced workflow solutions for storytellers that need collaboration without boundaries. EditShare’s open solutions and APIs enable secure collaboration and maximize efficiency every step of the way. The award-winning product portfolio enables end-to-end workflows, on-premise and in the cloud, through media optimized shared storage, workflow aligned media management solutions, robust APIs, and an Emmy award-winning non-linear video editing application.
©2020 EditShare LLC. All rights reserved. EditShare® is a registered trademark of EditShare.
Press Contact
Alex Molina
Zazil Media Group
(e) alex@zazilmediagroup.com
(p) +1 (617) 834-9600
Networks and studios want reviewers to view and write about new shows and movies. Writers want an easy experience to access pre-release content. Both parties want to keep content secure. But despite these closely aligned goals, the relationship between content producers and reviewers can sometimes get contentious. The reason? Reviewers hate screening sites.
We reached out to 200 press writers, bloggers and reviewers and asked for their opinions about what they love and what they hate about screener sites. Through in-depth interviews and surveys, we learned about the current issues surrounding the screener ecosystem. Incredibly, only 9% of reviewers are somewhat satisfied with the current state of affairs and none are “very satisfied”. Clearly, there is nowhere to go but up in serving a key audience disillusioned with tools critical to performing their jobs.
Frozen Out
So what do reviewers dislike so much about digital screening platforms? Their number one complaint: Lack of reliability. In fact, 50% of reviewers said they have missed a deadline or failed to write a review at all due to technical issues with a screener.
“Often times, because there is so much television these days, it is a last minute thing when I am getting to a show,” explains Rob Owen, TV Critic of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “And then to get to it, and not being able to watch because it stops every 10 seconds is very frustrating.”
“It’s assumed that screeners are going to be poor quality.”
Colleen Kelsey, Assoc. Editor, Interview Magazine
There are multiple reasons why a video might not work, with many on the user’s end including unsupported browsers, bad wi-fi connections and internet outages. But since most online screening solutions don’t offer dedicated support, reviewers are left to reach out to their PR contacts, who in turn must get help from their IT or operations department. If the issue happens after hours to a reporter on deadline—well, you can kiss that coveted coverage goodbye.
Log-in Chaos
The second most common complaint reviewers have about screeners is the need to juggle multiple logins and ways of accessing content. Half of reviewers have access to more than 20 screener sites, all of which require different URLs and usernames and utilize different password rotation and complexity requirements. The end result: frustrated reviewers and an alarming number of potential loopholes in security.
“Just managing the variety of ways you have to get screeners is now a huge part of the job for everybody…sometimes it’s like ‘how much trouble is this worth?”
Ellen Gray, TV Critic, The Philadelphia Inquirer
While distribution is increasingly going digital, press reviewers still get about 25% of their screeners via DVD. About half of those discs are never destroyed or thrown away. Even more worrisome, only 8% of reviewers use unique passwords stored in a password manager.
To manage the proliferation of screener destinations and credentials, the rest leave passwords scribbled on Post-It notes, keep the same password across all sites, store them in Google Sheets shared with colleagues, and use other less than desirable password management strategies. The end result? Many screening sites are shockingly susceptible to attack by enterprising hackers willing to cross-reference a reporter’s publicly posted email address with the latest password dump.
Relegated to a small screen
Critics are just like the rest of us – they prefer to watch shows and movies on a big screen, perhaps with a bowl of popcorn or beer in hand. Even though reviewers are paid to watch new content, they tend to do it after office hours; peak viewing time for screeners is between 8-9 PM in any given time zone.
“There are certainly some shows that you want to see on a bigger screen…viewing on a laptop is really not the ideal situation.”
Rock Ellis, Managing Editor, AllYourScreens
This viewing pattern has a few ramifications. First, reviewers are often accessing content when there is no longer any technical support available at the network or studio, should they run into a problem. Secondly, despite the fact that most people in the industry now have Apple TVs, Rokus, Fire TV Sticks, or other devices, most screeners are still only offered online and must be viewed on a PC, laptop or tablet. The lack of a compatible TV app was listed as the third most common pain point for reviewers.
“My main problem with any screener site is that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to find ways to cast it on to regular television,” says Randee Dawn, entertainment writer for TODAY.com and NBCNews.com. “I’m not a huge fan of watching on my computer screen because I spend hours in front of my computer anyway. It’s kind of a turnoff for me in terms of trying to invest time to watch screeners.”
Is There A Better Way?
Reviewers want to give network content an honest, timely review and, as industry professionals, they’re just as concerned as creators about keeping pre-release content safe until premiere date. They’re even willing to jump through some additional hoops if the overall experience is easy and seamless.
“If the industry would adopt a centralized solution with everything in one place, I would happily accommodate much tighter security.”
Alyssa Rosenberg, Culture Writer, The Washington Post
Dawn proposes a potential solution: “What would be nice is having some sort of central site where you have just one log-in, and all networks have just agreed to use it.”
While the idea of a destination screening site seems radical, it’s reality for many reviewers today. Think about the problems a centrally managed site solves. Networks and studios are all doing duplicate work to achieve good playback. By banding together on one platform, content creators could ensure better quality of service and enterprise-level security, offered with 24/7 high-touch support. All while freeing PR and marketing professionals to develop relationships with reviewers and promote content, rather than troubleshooting technical issues.
The future of screeners is here. Screeners.com addresses all of the issues cited by critics, making it easy to view all of the content they’ve been invited to preview in one frustration-free destination. We’ve also taken the requests of PR and marketing teams (and the IT teams that support them) to heart, providing turnkey, branded screening rooms protected with industry-leading security.
World Class User Experience
Screeners.com provides critics and reviewers with a simple interface with a video player that just works. No buffering, no broken connections. And if for some reason your reviewers do have an issue, we provide industry leading customer support so that your team doesn’t have to field angry phone calls.
Simple and Secure
Leave your password log-in and security issues in the past. Screeners.com uses secure Magic Link technology so that your reviewers can just worry about watching your content: no passwords, no frustration. When combined with SafeStream visible and forensic watermarking, your PR team can be a hero to critics and the content security team.
Let Viewers Watch Where They Want To
The critics have spoken: give us the ability to watch on the big AND small screen. Screeners.com lets viewers watch your pre-release content on a native Apple TV app, cast to other connected devices, or watch on their PC or laptop. By giving reviewers a simple experience across platforms, you’ve eliminated the barriers to getting the coverage your content deserves and giving you a better shot during awards season.
Happy Press Reviewers = Good Reviews
Screeners.com keeps you in control of your content and brand, while keeping some of your most important viewers happy and engaged. It’s time to implement a simple, secure, and frictionless system for both you and your reviewers, and always keep them coming back the next time. The more barriers you can remove between your content and your reviewers, the better off everyone will be.
“I’m genuinely thrilled when something new pops up in Screeners.com rather than other screening sites.”
Jacqueline Cutler, Freelance Journalist
Learn more about sharing pre-release content with reviewers, critics, and other stakeholders with Screeners.com.
EditShare’s video workflow and storage solutions power the biggest names in entertainment and advertising, helping them securely manage, present, and collaborate on their highest-value projects. To learn more about how EditShare can help your video production team, contact us today.
Authorized training and certification program designed to help video, IT and sales professionals design and build open and secure media workflows using EditShare
Boston, MA – February 4, 2020 – EditShare® a technology leader that specializes in collaboration, security, and intelligent storage solutions for media creation and management, today announced that registration is now open for its EditShare Academy authorized training and certification program. A modern approach to advancing professional development and technical mastery of EditShare solutions, EditShare Academy offers online and instructor-led courses within a tiered certification curriculum that equips IT administrators, video professionals, and sales associates with the knowledge to design and deploy open, secure EditShare-powered production and editorial workflows around industry-leading creative solutions.
The recommended prerequisite to the complete EditShare Academy curriculum, the EditShare Certified Associate training course is open for general enrollment today. The EditShare Sales Professional and EditShare Certified Engineer courses will follow shortly in Q2 and Q3 of this year.
“The EditShare Certified Associate training course provides foundational knowledge around EditShare’s progressive experiences as a company and its innovative technology. It gives students a glimpse into how EditShare solutions can propel open, secure and transformative workflows for on-premise, cloud, and hybrid implementations,” states Stuart McGeechan, vice president of customer success, EditShare. “By educating everyone that touches EditShare, from administrators to sales professionals to engineers onto the end-users who make the stories we love to watch, we create a globally consistent, world-class customer experience that is second to none.”
Comprised of easy to follow multimedia content designed to enhance understanding and test knowledge of EditShare solutions, the EditShare Certified Associate track takes students through EditShare’s history, product line, and industry solutions in approximately 90 minutes from start to finish.
About EditShare Academy Certification
EditShare Academy is a mix of instructor-led and e-learning courses designed to take students from beginner to expert proficiency in EditShare tools and workflows. Certification tracks include:
- EditShare Associate Certification: Provides channel partners and customers with the foundational knowledge of EditShare products and solutions.
- EditShare Engineer Certification: Upon completion, channel partners and customers will command expert technical and operational knowledge of EditShare products and solutions.
- EditShare Sales Professional Certification: Designed for channel partners who actively support customers through the sales process and manage ongoing customer success, Sales Professional Certification ensures a consistent experience for all EditShare customers everywhere.
EditShare Academy enrollment is open to anyone who wants to expand their knowledge of EditShare solutions and workflows. To learn more or register for the EditShare Associate certification track, please visit: https://editshare.live/Academyisopen
About EditShare
EditShare is a technology leader in networked shared storage and smart workflow solutions for the post-production, TV, sports and film industries. Our groundbreaking products improve efficiency and workflow collaboration every step of the way. They include ingest and playout servers, high-performance central shared storage, AQC, archiving and backup software, media asset management and an Emmy award-winning non-linear video editing application.
©2020 EditShare LLC. All rights reserved. EditShare® is a registered trademark of EditShare.
Press Contact
Alex Molina
Zazil Media Group
(e) alex@zazilmediagroup.com
(p) +1 (617) 834-9600
A few days before we shot Father Figurine, I sat down for an interview with Austen, who was helping shoot the behind-the-scenes video for Shift, and he asked how it felt to prep a movie so quickly after spending so much time writing the script. Austen was trying to get at the idea that once you actually go and make the thing, it suddenly becomes this huge crunch, but I genuinely didn’t feel that way about pre-production. Sure, there was lots of work to be done, but once we got the grant, we had about three months to prep the project, which was more than enough time for a short, and I rarely felt rushed.
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Producers Brendan and Garrett Christian Hall look on at director Jonathan Langager during the Shift Showcase.
As the inaugural year of the Shift Creative Fund drew to a close, we celebrated the first cohort at a showcase earlier this year. The four filmmakers who received grants (and the crews who produced their works — filmmaking, after all, is deeply collaborative) generously joined us on stage to reflect on their films and the lessons they walked away with at the end of the productions. It was an eye-opening conversation worth sharing with other creators; let’s find out what they had to say.
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Learn more about connecting MediaSilo with Zapier.
User productivity is our #1 goal here at MediaSilo. That’s why we built a Zapier integration for our flagship platform: to let you build custom workflows from the thousands of apps available on the Zapier marketplace.
Did You Know?
Zapier creates “webhooks,” simple integrations that send information from one place to another. For example, when you sign up for flight notifications on your phone, your airline uses a webhook to transmit information from its system to the SMS provider.
Apply the same idea to MediaSilo — you could be notified whenever changes are made in the system in ways that are most convenient for you.
Below are the three most popular ways our customers use Zapier to amp up their MediaSilo workflow. They’re all time-savers that are quick and simple to set up. You might just want to add one (or more) to your toolkit.
Warner Bros. recently trolled Pokémon fans with a fake leak of Detective Pikachu, which turned out to be a 100-minute video of Pikachu dancing. Jokes aside, content leaks represent huge costs to media properties in both clean-up and lost revenue, and a large portion of them come from seemingly mundane scenarios.
Like when Mr. Bigshot Film Critic shares his screener password with his wife who then shares it with her — oops! — book club or when the VP of marketing at XYZ Studios leaves her iPad unlocked, giving her kids access to share, say, the final episode of TV’s most popular show ever.
When it comes to pre-release content, all kinds of people representing all levels of tech and security savvy may have access to your most important content. A network may be sharing show previews with press reviewers, predominantly TV, film, and cultural critics. Authorized viewers might also include VIPs such as writers, directors, and actors; an external post-production or marketing team; and internal team members tasked with sharing the content. A single mundane mishap can cause problems that range from damaged media properties to very costly clean-up.
Good news is most leaks can be prevented with a few simple measures, but when a leak happens, you’ll first need to trace the sequence of events, including who shared the content and how. Start by asking these three questions:
What’s the content?
Is it cultish or nerdy with a strong fanbase? Does it have a highly anticipated reveal? Has it been well marketed? If you answer yes to any of these, chances are someone out there likes the content and thinks everyone should see it right away.
What controls were in place when the content owner shared it?
Did they lower their guard either accidentally or on purpose? Why did they lower their guard? Were they, for instance, helping an executive log in who forgot her password? Or was it something else? Typically, they’re trying to reduce friction for someone they trust to access the content.
How did the authorized user lose custody of the content?
Was it shared on purpose or by accident? With or without their knowledge? Authorized users don’t usually pirate content directly. In fact, they sometimes share it on purpose, which leads to the first threat: oversharing.
Threat #1: Oversharing or “The Lover Threat”
Who else in your life knows at least one password you use whether it’s for your laptop or email? At least one person — your partner, family member, or BFF — likely has access to your digital assets. Often where there’s a relationship in place (romantic or otherwise), there’s a risk that the authorized user will intentionally share access with an unauthorized user. We call this “The Lover Threat.”
Here’s how it might happen. Let’s say you’re a TV critic who got a screener of a pilot from a network’s PR firm. You share it with your boo, thinking you’ll change the password to the screener later. That person probably doesn’t pose a threat, but what if he shares it with someone else who has no loyalty to you?
Or maybe you forward the email invitation to the screener, and whoever receives it — can you really control who does or doesn’t? — downloads, rips, or shares the file? Things can get hairy fast.
When you’re searching for a software solution to these issues, be sure that it includes the following security measures.
The best antidote to passwords? No passwords at all. Systems that use an email verification process like Magic Link ensure that the content is only accessible through the reviewer’s email, so there’s no longer a password to forward or share.
- Multifactor Authentication (MFA)
Since email can be compromised and passwords shared, content owners should be able to turn on MFA as an additional layer of protection. Multifactor involves authenticating your identity with a code from a third-party application like Authy or Google Auth, typically on your smartphone. The downside to MFA is that it adds an extra step to login and can be troublesome if you lose your phone, which is why we also recommend alternatives like biometrics and physical security key, which we discuss below.
Visible watermarking takes the form of a personalized watermark burned onto a video file the moment a viewer presses play. The authorized viewer’s name and email immediately appear on the video player, communicating that the viewer is, in some ways, also being watched.
In addition to the visible layer, you can find software like our own SafeStream that includes an invisible watermarking system that can help analyze and track down the leaky workflow and user.
- Digital Rights Management (DRM)
DRM is a set of technologies that allows content owners to issue time-limited licenses to content and offer enhanced security. It locks down the player, which makes ripping the video harder.
We recommend that all networks and content owners ask reviewers to sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) and other legally binding contracts and to train them how not to share content.
With these features in place, it becomes much harder for users to share content, accidentally or otherwise.
At Shift Media, we include all of these security measures in Screeners.com, a screening app for networks to share pre-release content with a variety of viewers.
Threat #2: Stored Credentials or “The Open iPad”
One threat has recently worsened and is more common than we realized: when an unauthorized user has standing access or can gain access to an authorized user’s credentials. We call this “The Open iPad” because devices save passwords that people reuse and share, and family and friends often know each other’s password habits and four- to six-digit passcodes.
In the scenario shown above, a network’s publicist may not know that the reviewer has a secondary device with direct access to the content or indirectly through email. Anyone who knows how to get into the device can break in and leak its content.
Here, Magic Link directly addresses the password-storing and sharing issue — no more passwords! MFA also helps in this situation as long as the authenticator app also isn’t registered on the same device. At Shift Media, we prefer to register the device and to expire that registration in a number of days or weeks. Otherwise, the device becomes stale, so to speak, and others can gain easy access.
Again, visible watermarking reminds the potential leaker who the iPad belongs to, which may give them pause. It also forces the leaker to put in the work of anonymizing the watermark, while forensic watermarks help track down the leaky workflow and user. DRM further complicates the downloading and ripping process.
Threat #3: Account compromise
The last everyday threat is when an unauthorized user compromises the email or system account of an authorized user. The attacker has no loyalty to the authorized user and either phished them or compromised their email or system account.
The general public is becoming more aware of the controls available against email compromise, but phishing and compromise accounts are still quite common. MFA remains today’s best defense against such compromises, but MFA can be problematic. At Shift Media, we’re looking at biometrics and physical factors as the next frontiers.
Studios and production companies deal with close proximity issues such as people trying to get on set — by faking identities, for instance — and these people might try to defeat endpoint controls, though probably not by spoofing fingerprints. However, when it comes to sharing pre-release content, proximity is less of a concern. We’re more worried about securing web and mobile software, so biometrics and physical factor protections are very useful.
For instance, iPhone users are probably familiar with TouchID, FaceID, and Face Unlock. All require a body part — finger, face — to unlock, but because those are individual to the iPhone owner, access can’t be shared widely and, beyond an unlikely horror movie-like scenario involving severed fingers and other grim possibilities, can’t be stolen. Availability and quality of biometric protections varies, where mobile (and particularly iOS) has a strong product, so we’re now waiting for the rest of the industry to catch up.
As for physical security, we like YubiKeys on the U2F standard, a USB device that plugs into laptops. The physicality of YubiKey makes it difficult to steal beyond a shared device and outside of one’s immediate social circle. Availability varies, so having both protections are important — biometrics where available on mobile and personal devices and physical security keys on everything else.
Besides these solutions, you can also use a watchmen service to monitor anomalous activity. These activities include users on too many devices in too many different locations, accessing content from odd locations, simultaneous viewing from multiple devices, watching more than twenty-four hours of content in a day, and watching the same content twice from two devices on the same account.
When it comes to security for Screeners.com, we’ve focused our attention on improving detection and responses to these particular scenarios, which we see as the most common sources of our customers’ leaks. Our approach to content protection was born out of several decades of experience developing and maintaining other Shift Media products: MediaSilo, a content-sharing platform and lightweight cloud DAM, as well as Wiredrive, a cloud content library with presentation workflows.
All to say, we’re seasoned experts who’ve observed the pitfalls that our customers and others in the industry regularly encounter. The notes we’ve shared here result from decades of experience, and we hope they prove helpful in protecting the content you’ve worked so hard to create.
