“ Another new frontier is DRM for
UGC.”
contract.“ What we do is really scope that out ahead of time using our knowledge of ramp up periods, for example. We also allow clients to re-price annually, so they can buy up into a bigger pool or, if need be, they can move down a pool.”
“ And from a technical standpoint, our MultiKey Server is the most robust in the business. It will spit out 5-600 licenses a second for all three DRMs. This is what avoids a gatecrash on live events. For example, with HBO Go in Europe, Asia and Latin America, the night before a new Game of Thrones came out, we’ d always get a call from HBO in New York asking if we were ready? And we’ d say, yes, we’ re here at our desks standing by. Ten years later we have a completely automated AI application that watches over the platform and scales it up or down as needed. This approach has been battle-tested. We did the opening ceremony for the Olympics, we do Thursday night football with Twitch.” SWIMMER. Streaming is a business where Levy learned to be a strong swimmer a long time ago. He moved to Austin after military service and was busy working security at a bunch of the music clubs that the city is famous for.“ I convinced some of the owners to install an ISDN line and do some live webcasts – an early one was a Willy Nelson gig at The Backyard. Before long my company, Click Here, along with others, became experts in livestream and we started doing national events.”
“ One of the big advantages of this grounding is it allows me to educate my colleagues in how to deal with media associates. It requires a certain psychological understanding of what the pressures and dynamics are in large media companies. That’ s how we got to do the DRM for the MPAA with
“ The way watermarking has been done is an uneconomic way to catch pirates.” the Academy Awards, for seven divisions of Sony, all the DRM for BBC
iPlayer for nine years, etc, etc.”
It is fair to say Levy has an unromantic approach to the business, as befits one who has seen the movie and its sequels many times before.“ When the economy falls of a cliff suddenly content providers interest in piracy prevention or capture falls with it – everything is focussed on customer acquisition and retention. When the market turns up again I don’ t think people will want to return to the kind of bespoke solutions that have come from CAS providers.” WATERMARKING.“ In watermarking, for example, our multi-mark server sits at the origin server, rather than at the edge, and marks up the content as it is requested; it’ s a lot more affordable, it’ s a lot more manageable and it’ s a lot less dependent on relations between CDNs and CAS companies. There’ s no specific edge code or implementation approach, it requires no additional cost form the CDN operator. The way watermarking has been done is an uneconomic way to catch pirates, it’ s like over here, we just killed off the penny because it was costing three or four cents to make every coin. That’ s watermarking right now.”
Another new frontier is DRM for User Generated Content. YouTube is using it on premium content and BuyDRM has recently taken on Passes, a platform where major entertainers and athletes go to generate their own UGC. It uses DRM and will soon deploy watermarking also.“ Now all these services are ad supported or premium, DRM is good enough to protect them: if a user pays, say, $ 50 for an all-access pass to athletes in Passes, it is worth a $ 1 to protect that content from being downloaded and just passed along to a dozen buddies each of whom could come up with their own $ 50.”
“ Looking ahead to the next few years, there’ s going to be a lot of flux. I predict that for the consumer there’ s going to continue to be siloed premium content, and that perpetuates application fragmentation, until some financially dominant players drive consolidation; it will become more like the mobile market; fewer, bigger, players and less like the cereal aisle at the supermarket.”
BuyDRM™ is a leading global provider of content security services for the entertainment, education, enterprise, and hospitality industries. BuyDRM’ s KeyOS content security platform powers many of the largest brands in media and technology. With decades of market-leading experience implementing commercial content security solutions and media technologies, BuyDRM has amassed substantial success stories for many of today’ s largest brands such as ABC( Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Daily Rounds, EPIX, FuboTV, PlayMedia, Rakuten Viki, Roku, Samsung TV +, Red Bee Media, SBS Australia, Soundcloud, Sportradar, Telenet, TubiTV, and Vubiquity.
EUROMEDIA 19