Executive interview
Executive interview
Digital Rights Management is the foundation stone of streaming, allowing content owners to control their distribution and, therefore, exploit its value.
DRM: The cornerstone of
DRM underpins the successful exploitation of content rights over the Internet. BuyDRM is a boutique provider ensuring the best DRM performance for your content.
It was born out of the Wild West of the late nineties web when tech companies were seen as enabling the wholesale theft of music rights through peer-to-peer players such as Kazaa and Limewire. And so, the likes of Widevine and Microsoft’ s Playready were born, along with Apple’ s Fairplay.
“ Today we are living in a Widevine world,” says Christopher Levy, co-founder and CEO of BuyDRM. He explains that since Widevine became part of Google, the fact that it is the DRM for Chrome and Android hands it the number one spot worldwide, though Fairplay is a big player in premium content markets, particularly in the US. CLIENTS. To prove the point, Levy, speaking from his office in Austin, Texas, calls up a daily report dashboard of DRM provision across all BuyDRM’ s clients, he reels off a few examples; TuBee, Samsung TV Pluss, Rakuten, fubo, NBC Universal …,“ Widevine in some cases is anywhere from seventy-six to one hundred per cent of the DRM licensing. Fairplay goes from two to forty five per cent – depends on what the content is and what the platform is. Playready is now insignificant, but Microsoft is still monetising by licensing
“ This has revolutionised our business in the last two years.”
streaming
the IP to Google.”
“ Fairplay, as well as being for the Apple ecosystem, is also the DRM of choice for premium services. It is widely used, for example, for e. learning services, and it will be expanding with the latest news that it is being licensed for the first time for use on Android based TVs.”
Levy lives and breathes DRM and has done since its inception.“ We refer to ourselves as a boutique – there are only thirteen of us in the company, but we have been around for twenty-four years.” He says a strength has been their deep specialisation; the company has never been a CAS developer or vendor, and he points out that the landscape is now littered with struggling CAS vendors who came late to DRM. PROCESS.“ Our process is that we go after major players, and we walk them through their requirements: what platforms do you want to reach? What’ s the nature of the content? Do you need Android and Apple? What models will you deploy: AVoD, SVoD, PPV, etc? What is the distribution method; live, as-live, on demand? We can then scope their DRM requirements.”
In order to serve the DRM licences, BuyDRM has three basic models: SaaS,‘ Multikey Service’, where pools of all three main licences are provided and the service scales – and is priced – with volume of use. The only licence the customer needs a separate certificate for is Fairplay, and that sits in their server.
Some clients want an‘ on prem’ approach where they want to run the license server in their cloud,“ so we take them to Microsoft, Apple and Google and put them at the front of the queue to get those certificates, we put them on our DRM servicer and give it back to the customer; Inflight Entertainment is an example.” VOLUME. The big determinant of which model is deployed is volume of licences served, and Levy says for big users the trend is towards their unique Managed Service Offering.“ We build the DRM node in the customer’ s cloud
“ Another differentiator is not overpricing the client.” and we run it for them; remote managed services. They provision an AWS or other cloud account for us as part of their account, they set the permissions so that we only see what is in that account, we go in and deploy the DRM solution, all the APIs, we make sure all the certification, logging, and authentication, is working and then we basically log out. The customer has internal APIs they use to access that DRM platform in their cloud, at their cost, at their economy of scale, and unlimited licensing. This has revolutionised our business in the last two years, and we continue to get a lot of traction around that.”
“ Overall, we don’ t consult with customers on which DRM to use, we consult on what’ s the best model for their deployment, for their spend. That’ s where we spend our time. So, if a customer wants a fixed a price for unlimited licences, then MSO is the way to go, and it unshackles business models. Without that availability new models like AVoD and FAST weren’ t taking off because DRM models were based on pricing for SVoD and PPV, there weren’ t high volume, high scaling, pricing models. What we have done is figure out how to scale DRM in a fast and effective manner.” ECOSYSTEM. Levy says key to these wins is having such a long term and vibrant partner ecosystem.“ We have a thing called the Encoder, Server Player, ESP system. Our customers need their DRM system to work with two crucial interfaces, their encoder and their player. We pre-load that by having all these integrations in place with all the encoders, packagers and streaming servers. It is a key advantage to have all those preintegrations in place.”
Another differentiator is not overpricing the client. He says it is routine for some vendors to set a price by volume but then have little flexibility for growth, or allowance for service enhancement – HD, UHD, multiple audio etc, so more volume and enhancements quickly ramps the licences required, and the customer is into very expansive overages on their
“ The big determinant of which model is deployed is volume of licences served.”
18 EUROMEDIA