Content Security

Tools for the Trade

The major content companies, including movie and TV studios as well as record companies, as a group seem to be getting more comfortable with putting their products out there for the world to access, at a price, of course. Just look at all the programming and music available at iTunes, through mobile operators like Verizon Wireless, and the like.

Indeed, PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts the value of licensed, digitally distributed content will grow from $653 million in 2005 to $4.9 billion in 2010, a 49.5 percent compound annual increase.

But despite the advances that have been made in increasing content owners’ comfort levels regarding digital distribution, ensuring programming and music is secure and tagged with the appropriate authorization information, that it is in the correct format, and that everyone in the content delivery ecosystem is paid in an accurate and timely manner, can be a challenge. There are various industry efforts to standardize DRM and related technologies (see “Standardizing Security” sidebar below). But, even without standards, several suppliers today offer solutions to simplify and secure digital distribution.

thePlatform’s Ian Blaine

“Content licensing exhibits the same high degree of fragmentation, lack of transparency and time-consuming manual negotiation process we saw in telecommunications,” says Curt Hockemeier, president and CEO of Arbinet, which in December announced the acquisition of license management platform provider Flowphonics Ltd. for an undisclosed sum. “Simplifying the way rights are discovered, licensed, digitally distributed, with rights owners getting paid timely, is of growing importance and a key element of our digital media strategy.”

Flowphonics’ Rightsrouter system enables music and video rights owners to locate, transact, distribute and manage their content with such services as iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster and Beatport. It creates an electronic marketplace for both sides to meet and transact with the capability to administer and negotiate rights agreements, encode and distribute content, and report, bill and clear all licensing transactions.

The architecture for thePlatform’s MPS solution Click to Enlarge

Another company, called thePlatform, sells to content owners and distributors the Media Publishing System (MPS) — usually provided as a managed service — that enables secure digital publishing and management of audio and video services. Among thePlatform’s customers are Amp’d Mobile, Comcast Corp. and ESPN.

With thePlatform MPS, Amp’d Mobile efficiently can aggregate and deliver youth-oriented audio and video over its 3G EV-DO service, and also via broadband to computers, in multiple formats (including MP3, WMA, WAV, AAC and MPEG-4) and bit rates. In addition to aggregating the content, MPS allows any metadata to be combined with the content, enabling consumers to find and receive personalized media. Using MPS, Amp’d also can give subscribers a detailed summary of their audio and video purchases on their monthly statements.

For Comcast, thePlatform powers the backend of its broadband video site, The Fan, bringing in content from top-tier programmers and managing metadata, says thePlatform’s CEO Ian Blaine.

ESPN, meanwhile, uses thePlatform’s MPS Connectors, which execute digital media syndication agreements by consolidating technical requirements from many partners to one. Blaine explains this allows ESPN to choose the mobile outlet to which it wants to direct various content, and Connectors ensures content is in the right bit rate and format, contains the right policy, and has the correct interfaces with the carriers.

Verimatrix’s Steve Oetegenn

Another company offering solutions in this vein is Verimatrix with its Video Content Authority System (VCAS) product. It’s an end-to-end content protection and content access control system that lets the user encrypt digital video, define access to it, and define viewing and consumption roles of that data. Verimatrix also offers the ability to support various encryption schemes on a single ingest headend.

According to Steve Oetegenn, executive vice president of global sales and marketing, VCAS was designed specifically for IPTV and telco TV in collaboration with major Hollywood studios. “We’ve deployed with more Tier 1 telcos than any other DRM solution provider,” says Oetegenn, listing Consolidated Communications, KT, NTT and Telecom Italia as customers. In Japan, there are more than 250,000 live subscribers on the Verimatrix system, which is accepted by all major content owners and is independently audited by a third party, he adds.

Uncovering Digital Piracy

Some solutions addressing copyright today go beyond just securing music and programming to actually help content owners trace the footsteps of digital pirates.

Verimatrix’s VCAS solution includes a component called VideoMark, which sits in the set-top box or a PC, to put forensic watermarks content. That way, if pirated video is found on the Internet, Verimatrix and its customers can track from which endpoint that content originated.

And a new company called Attributor Corp., which is backed by companies such as Google, Skype and Overture, is expected to soon release a beta version of its product, which is designed to troll the Internet for copyright violations. It does this by scanning billions of pages on the Web for clients’ audio, video, images and text, according to a Dec. 18 story in The Wall Street Journal.

Standardizing Security

SeaChange International’s Tom Rosenstein

The cable companies have spent the last several years trying to get out of the Motorola/Scientific-Atlanta vendor duopoly they bought into decades ago, explains Tom Rosenstein, vice president of business development at SeaChange International, which sells VoD solutions. Those vendors provided good solutions, but at the same time, they locked the cablecos into their proprietary offerings, particularly related to conditional access.

Now cablecos and others see the value of more open systems for securing content, yet there still are no widely accepted standards for conditional access and digital rights management, and some say that Microsoft TV actually is working against the move to an open system for DRM. But there is plenty of work being done to advance the cause. Here are a few key examples.

This cross-industry group promotes interoperability between DRM technologies used in the consumer media market. Its goal is to create a common technology framework for content, device and service providers, regardless of the DRM technologies they use. The open technology framework promises to enable a simple and consistent digital entertainment experience for consumers.

The DCAS effort out of CableLabs, a nonprofit research and development consortium run by the major cablecos, offers a cost-effective, network-agnostic solution for interactive two-way devices that connect to cable systems, allowing cable operators to download their conditional access system of choice to devices connected to the cable network.

DCAS is designed to operate with interactive cable set-top boxes as well as integrated digital televisions with built-in set-top capabilities, and other retail devices that include a special chip. The DCAS Host License Agreement is available to any consumer electronics manufacturer on a nondiscriminatory basis.

OMA aims to facilitate global user adoption of mobile data services by specifying market-driven mobile service enablers that ensure service interoperability across devices, geographies, service providers, operators and networks, while allowing businesses to compete through innovation and differentiation. In April 2006, OMA announced the public availability of its DRM Version 2.0 Service Enabler.

“That seems to have some early promise for mobile, but it’s not clear it’s taking off anyplace else,” says Rosenstein of SeaChange.

Added Insight

Check out our IPTV Q&A with Microsoft TV’s Ed Graczyk by visiting the Added Insight section at http://www.xchangemag.com/hotnews/5ch1216613.html.

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