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DRM for Streaming Video

Posted: 15/09/09

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There's a part of the online video industry that is getting feverishly busy at the moment, but it isn't quite where you'd expect it. Yes, the battle involves Flash Player and Silverlight, but you'd be wrong in thinking it's about video quality, player penetration stats or smooth streaming. In fact, user experience doesn't figure in this fight, but it could well be the battle that decides the war over who will reign supreme over high value video content, such as movies and TV. I am of course talking about content protection or Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Love it or loathe it, DRM has become an important part of delivering valuable media over the Internet, and a subject I have found fascinating since studying it as part of my post-grad thesis. Put plainly, content owners want to sell you the file, but they don't want you sharing it with everyone else on the Internet, so they wrap it up in a container that requires you to identify yourself to a license acquisition server before you're allowed to access the content. This is something that has been going on with online content distributors for a fair while - Steve Jobs's gang at Apple have been shifting a lot of music and video through the iTunes Store for years, protected with their own FairPlay DRM – but this isn't something that runs in the browser, or can be played immediately as Video On-Demand (VOD). The focus has now shifted to into browser-based VOD services like Hulu and blinkbox; allowing DRM streaming to plug-ins such as Flash Player and Silverlight.

Who are the main players?

Flash (Adobe)

This is the plug-in that was nurtured by Macromedia inc since the late 90s, and then acquired by Adobe following their purchase of Macromedia in 2005. The Flash runtime has been documented as being responsible for the delivery of 80% of video on the Internet, and is currently the favoured VOD platform for content distributers. Around 98% of users in developed markets have a Flash Player 9 runtime capable of playing H.264 video content. Where Flash has been lacking though is content protection; whilst the distributors have been wallowing in the ubiquity of the platform and the relative ease of targeting new runtime features, the content owners have been far from satisfied. Flash Player, when used in conjunction with Flash Media Streaming Server, is able to secure the delivery of video content to the client; through the combination of a propriety encrypted protocol called RTMPE, and a client checking system called SWF Verification. Where Flash Player fails, however, is on DRM; it simply doesn't have it.

Silverlight (Microsoft)

The new Microsoft browser plug-in that allows the development of applications similar in nature to Flash. They already have DRM factored into their solution, called Windows DRM (WMDRM) and the new PlayReady. WDRM is already favoured by a lot of high value content owners for fully-downloadable WMV content (to Windows Media Player 10), so Microsoft has minimal work to do to convince these owners to embrace a streamed variant of the same technology. Silverlight is an emerging technology, and presently has a low install base – around 40% of connected computers. Silverlight is seen by the content owners as the magic bullet; but this view isn't shared by the content distributors, who see the majority of their would-be customers using the Flash runtime. Something found to be lacking in Silverlight 3.0 is Certified Output Protection Protocol (COPP), which prevents recording of the video stream from the graphics adapter. I'm sure this is down to a dependency on certain Windows libraries which aren't cross-platform.

Recently, Adobe announced they were throwing their hat into the ring and launching Flash Access 2.0, a Digital Rights Management solution to supersede Flash Media Rights Management Server (now removed from sale on their site). It will need a new version of the Flash Player to be deployed when it is released, and given that Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst are on-hold until next year, I would imagine this is all going to coincide with a release of the next version of Flash Player. This will be the first time the Flash Platform as a whole has had DRM capabilities; however, desktop runtime Adobe AIR has been able to consume Flash Media Rights Management Server content since 2008.

The adoption of either technology by content distributers will not alone ensure one side's dominance over the other. If content owners do not approve the DRM solution being offered by the distributer, the license agreements become void and the owners can withdraw their content. So it becomes clear that the battle with DRM is not really to win over technology companies and the developers that build these solutions, but is in fact to become the favoured DRM technology for content owners. What does this mean? It means that if Adobe or Microsoft invests the time (and money) in seeking acceptance and endorsements from big studios and production companies who own the rights to much of the sought-after video content on the Internet, they will in turn receive the support of content distributers. In short, unless content owners accept the proposed DRM mechanism as a valid way of protecting their content, third-party platforms that distribute the content are wasting their time implementing it.

Microsoft have made a clear head-start in this area, and were it not for the infancy of the Silverlight platform, they may have already obtained the upper-hand. Adobe have now made a clear statement of intent, and the white paper accompanying their announcement alludes to much of what I have discussed here. What will be interesting to see is how this not only plays out in the technology released in the coming months, but in the partnerships and alliances that are formed too.

Keywords for this post: flash, silverlight, video, drm, flash access, playready, wmdrm, digtal, rights management, adobe, microsoft