Limited View Video

I don't know the answer, but I do know of several places to look.

I imagine the time limiting could be done by sending a cookie to the user's browser when the video page is first accessed. When visitors return, the browser would automatically send the cookie back to the server. If the cookie is more than three hours old, the user would be redirected to the "time's up" page.

This would not work for users who have their browsers set to block cookies, nor for users who figure out that they can break your time-lock by clearing the cookie before they return. But it should work for most users.

If users must be logged in with a Wordpress login to your site before they can see the video, another possibility would be add a field to the wp_users database table for the user's first allowed view of the video. When the user logs in, this field is checked. If it's either empty or less than three hours old, the user may navigate to the video page.

A more sophisticated version would add a videos table (with adjustable expiration time per video), and a video-watched-by-user table, making it possible to track any number of videos. Rather than videos, it would be more generic to refer to limited time assets which could be any type of content.

I don't know of any plugins to automate this kind of tracking, but I've never looked for one either. With these tips, perhaps you'll be able to find one searching at WordPress › WordPress Plugins.

Another possibility would use not Wordpress, but Flash or Silverlight to provide the security check. The video would be wrapped with code that gets some kind of user machine ID, "phones home" with that ID over a secure channel, and only unlocks the code to download or stream the video if the user hasn't had a previous session within three hours. Again, I don't know for sure if such an API call is available and if so, whether anyone has written such code.

Finally, it might be possible to have the timeout check code at the level of the webserver (such as Apache or IIS) or script interpreter (such as PHP, JSP or ASP.Net), perhaps making use of .htaccess. This way, any site (not just Wordpress) could have time-limited assets.

If you find something, please report back here.

Chris

Which plugin did you find?

I'm curious what technique they use.