Anyone use Google Drive for hosting secure videos?

[whitmanjg]

One of the products the company I work for sells is an online video webinar (recording of a past seminar). We charge for it and then give users access to the videos via an (essentially) password protected webpage where the videos are embedded. Right now we are using an extremely overpriced service that allows us unlimited storage and bandwidth (I dont think we need the unlimited storage since I compress the videos for web viewing anyway).

Anyway I am looking at possible alternatives for hosting to save us some money, one of the interesting options I have come across is Google Drive. I like that the videos hosted are streaming, that is not the case with our current service which uses progressive download (if I understand correctly, this fact would eliminate our need for unlimited bandwidth, correct?). Plus, we already use Google Drive to backup some of our files a the office so we are already paying for storage and adding more on wouldnt be too expensive.

Are there any downsides to using Google Drive for this purpose? Anyone have any experience using Google Drive to host secure videos?

 

[Siderz]

I think Google Drive is a good idea, but I'm pretty sure you can't password protect files/folders.

Maybe my expectations are a little high but, on my ~11Mbps upload speed, it takes quite a while to upload stuff, at least I've been trying to upload a 4GB folder with videos in it, but it takes too long for me to bother. It seems like the servers for Google Drive are very poor compared to the ones for YouTube, I guess it depends a lot on where you are in the world.

But, considering the stream capability, I think Google Drive is the way to go, otherwise Dropbox, because that also appears to be able to stream. I haven't tested this 4GB file on Dropbox, but I'm pretty sure Dropbox is a lot faster.

 

[winston1236]

I think Google Drive is a good idea, but I'm pretty sure you can't password protect files/folders.

Maybe my expectations are a little high but, on my ~11Mbps upload speed, it takes quite a while to upload stuff, at least I've been trying to upload a 4GB folder with videos in it, but it takes too long for me to bother. It seems like the servers for Google Drive are very poor compared to the ones for YouTube, I guess it depends a lot on where you are in the world.

But, considering the stream capability, I think Google Drive is the way to go, otherwise Dropbox, because that also appears to be able to stream. I haven't tested this 4GB file on Dropbox, but I'm pretty sure Dropbox is a lot faster.

You can protect files, Google drive is awesome.

 

[Siderz]

You can protect files, Google drive is awesome.

How?

 

[CaptainChunk]

How?

The way Google Drive protects files is by using an invitation-style system. When you turn protection on, the file and/or folder will only be visible to whoever was invited to it. But the drawback here is that the invitations only work for people with Google accounts (unless something has recently changed that I'm not aware of).

This is one leg-up DropBox and Hightail have. You can share resources with anyone with an email address, regardless of whether or not they have accounts for the respective services.