Mobile devices are widely used for uploading/downloading media files such as audio, video and images to/from the remote servers. These devices have limited resources and are required to offload resource-consuming media processing tasks to the clouds for further processing. Migration of these tasks means that the media services provided by the clouds need to be authentic and trusted by the mobile users. The existing schemes for secure exchange of media files between the mobile devices and the clouds have limitations in terms of memory support, processing load, battery power, and data size. These schemes lack the support for large-sized video files and are not suitable for resource-constrained mobile devices. This paper proposes a secure, lightweight, robust, and efficient scheme for data exchange between the mobile users and the media clouds. The proposed scheme considers High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Intra-encoded video streams in unsliced mode as a source for data hiding. Our proposed scheme aims to support real-time processing with power-saving constraint in mind. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is used as a base encryption technique by our proposed scheme. The simulation results dearly show that the proposed scheme outperforms AES-256 by decreasing the processing time up to 4.76% and increasing the data size up to 0.72% approximately. The proposed scheme can readily be applied to real-time cloud media streaming. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.