Short answer: no — SmartVideo isn’t a DRM product. What it does provide is a set of protections that stop casual copying and downloading, which is what most course, membership, and subscriber-only sites actually need. Here’s exactly where the line sits, so you can decide before you build around it.
What SmartVideo does protect
There’s no portable embed link. SmartVideo deliberately doesn’t hand out an iframe embed URL or a standalone https:// video link. A video you upload to the SmartVideo Library is referenced by an obfuscated swarmify:// pointer instead, so there’s no shareable link on the page for a viewer to copy and pass around. Does SmartVideo give me an iframe embed or a direct video link? covers why in full.
We serve our own encoded copies, and direct downloads of them are blocked. Whatever you give us, we encode our own renditions — streaming segments plus optimized MP4s — and the player picks the right one for each browser. Our edge drops a plain direct request for one of those MP4 files, so pasting a delivery URL into a downloader doesn’t get someone a file.
One thing to know: videos you host yourself. If your SmartVideo tag points at your own file — Amazon S3, Wasabi, Dropbox, your WordPress Media Library — that source URL is written into your page’s HTML, and it has to be publicly readable for us to fetch and encode it. Anyone viewing your page source can find it. If keeping the original out of reach matters to you, upload the video to your SmartVideo Library and embed the swarmify:// reference instead.
Playback can be locked to your domains. By default your Swarm CDN Key works anywhere, so you can test freely across staging and local environments. On request, our team applies a referrer-based rule so requests using your key from any other site are dropped. It’s applied manually rather than through a dashboard toggle today — email support@swarmify.com with the domains you want authorized. See Is my API key safe? for how the rule behaves, including the one caveat: viewers whose browsers strip the referrer can be blocked too, so send us every domain you need, staging ones included.
What SmartVideo does not provide
We’d rather you know this up front than discover it during a security review:
- The HLS streams are not AES-128 encrypted. Segments are delivered unencrypted.
- There are no signed URLs or expiring playback tokens. A playback session can’t be time-boxed or tied to an authenticated user at the CDN layer, so a stream URL pulled out of a logged-in session with browser developer tools keeps working.
- There’s no Widevine, FairPlay, or PlayReady DRM. It isn’t available today, and it isn’t something we’ve committed to building.
So the honest framing is: no-direct-download and anti-hotlinking protection, not DRM. If your content requires contractual DRM — licensed film or broadcast material, for instance — SmartVideo isn’t the right fit.
What this means in practice
For the common case — lectures, courses, member-only content, internal training — this is usually enough. Upload to the Library so the source file isn’t in your page, put your videos behind your own login, and ask us to lock your key to your domains — a casual viewer then has no straightforward way to save a copy or embed your video elsewhere.
What it won’t stop is a determined person recording their screen or using specialist tooling. That’s true of every platform: even enterprise DRM falls to someone willing to spend the time. The realistic goal is making copying inconvenient enough that it doesn’t happen casually, and that’s the bar SmartVideo clears.
If expiring tokens, signed URLs, or encrypted streams are a hard requirement for your project, email support@swarmify.com — we track these requests, and knowing your use case helps us prioritize.