Not only has there been a rise in investment in licencing and distribution, but there has also been a rise in investment in the production of original content as a result of the fast expanding digital media industry and the development of new players in the domain of over-the-top (OTT) content. The economic model of OTT platforms, which is based on subscriptions, can only be lucrative if the content is unique and the subscribers can be kept for an extended period of time. The fact that the content may be accessed instantly on millions of different devices leaves it open to the risk of being pirated. According to the findings of a study that was conducted not too long ago by the United States Chamber of Commerce and NERA Economic Consulting, piracy is responsible for the annual loss of revenue that amounts to USD 29.2 billion in the American economy.
Digital rights management, sometimes known as DRM, is an efficient method for safeguarding content that is streamed online and restricting its usage without authorization. When premium content including DRM video protection is published onto an OTT platform, this technology ensures that the metadata for that content is stored securely and is only accessed when it is required by the customer. It does this by employing a cryptographic key in order to encode and encrypt the content, which ultimately results in the content being safe for transmission from the platform server to the user device. In order for the user’s media player to be able to play the encrypted content, it will need to have the particular licence information that was supplied to it by the DRM server. A certificate exchange between the DRM client and the licencing server allows for authentic viewing and usage to be facilitated by the digital rights management (DRM) scheme, which in turn only releases content on trusted playback systems.
Encryption, however, is not sufficient on its own to prevent leaks from occurring due to the sharing of URLs and keys. DRM solutions provide additional functionalities such as “tokens” to ensure the integrity of incoming content requests, “entitlements” linked to the customer management systems to control which services the customers can access, and “HTTPs” to ensure the confidentiality of the stream. These additional functionalities are all designed to protect digital content. Streaming material on numerous devices, browsers, TVs, and consoles may be done in an efficient and cost-effective manner with the help of multi-DRM systems. multi-DRM systems provide tools for licence management that are compatible with multiple operating systems and multiple types of devices. In most cases, the MPEG-CENC standard is utilised by these solutions in order to make DRM functionality available across different devices. When a consumer makes a request for content, their metadata will concurrently be included together with the many DRMs that are linked with a single key. The individual DRMs are the ones who carry out the licence mapping and acquisition at this point, and the player that is installed on the user device is the one who selects which DRM is going to be used for the video playback.
The “just-in-time” functionality that is offered by many of the multi-DRM systems makes it possible for the client to request the content packaging at any time, regardless of when it was originally created.
