Protect your content
Digital Rights Management
In order to provide secure media content, DRM encryption is required. This allows content owners to control access to their content by issuing a DRM licence to a pre-authorised user. A DRM licence is based on a set of business rules that determine how, when and why the protected content can be viewed by users, e.g. play once, download for 1 month etc.
Twofour has a vast amount of experience in DRM working with:
- Microsoft PlayReady V2 (compataible with V1.5)
- Windows Media DRM10
- Adobe® Flash® Access 3.0
At the current time and based on our experience, Microsoft PlayReady is the superior product and when combined with Microsoft Smooth Streaming provides a highly secure and high quality viewing/listening experience for the user.
DRM Components
The key components in DRM are:
| DRM Type | Information | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Rights information |
Rights information for content is defined in its accompanying XML metadata. |
|||
|
DRM encryption |
Video content is encoded and then DRM packaged at Twofour:
|
|||
|
MediaFreedom |
Video management system controlling delivery of files. |
|||
|
Player |
Streaming or Desktop player running on host device, e.g. PC or
iPad. |
|||
|
Licence Server |
Provides DRM Licence keys (usually once a request has been authorised). |
|||
|
Delivery Server / CDN |
Serves the content once valid Licence is obtained by Player. |
|||
Mobile device DRM is achievable via PlayReady DRM but requires a 3rd Party Application to be installed on the end user device. Depending on requirements, we use Discretix, Authentec or Irdeto. We would need to undertake some consultancy to fully understand your requirements and provide detailed costs for Mobile DRM solutions. Please contact us for details.
End User Authentication (in conjunction with a Pay per View or Subscription Service)
A user's authentication can be based on a combination of:
- The user's email address+password / Facebook account
- The user's public IP address
- The user's MAC address or similar
- An individualisation string auto-generated by the player on the device
The public IP address is used to identify the user's location and ISP provider and this GeoIP information confirms the origin of the user during registration and authentication.
All authentication details are transferred over an SSL encrypted path and stored in a secure internal database.
MediaFreedom uses token-based authentication to support subscription, pay-per-view, download to own and rental. Once a client / end user has been authorised by checking against the User Database, MediaFreedom then handles the DRM licence request to decrypt the actual video file (see below).
Stream URL Authentication
MediaFreedom can support URL authentication. This provides a mechanism for securing a link to s atream to stop it being copied or deep linked.
When a piece of content is requested by a legitimate user the link is only available for a small amount of time - this means if the link is copied or deep linked it can not be reused. Although the content is not actually encrptyed.
Used in conjunction with DRM this is a powerful means to secure your conent.
Please call us for more details on our content protection services.
GEO Blocking
Our video platform includes market leading Geo-IP software from Digital Elements to provide user features like content recommendations,security and visual UI identify.
We can accurately pinpoint a viewer's location down to the city level, without being invasive, to allow legal access to content where licensing and copyright agreements are in place and to restrict the playing of media where it is illegal.
Our platform supports GeoIP by country, region, city, ISP and bandwidth.
Your administrators/editors can easily define which pieces of content are valid for each location in the CMS.
