#expressplay

The most common content protection technology was associated with set-top boxes (STBs) that decrypted cable and satellite broadcasts for those who had paid their subscription. These are known as conditional access systems (CAS). Although these legacy technologies are gradually becoming outdated and will eventually need to be replaced, they’re still forming a considerable part of the content protection technology stack of traditional pay-TV operators, and maintaining backwards compatibility is important. Thus there is a need to support both traditional broadcast services and OTT services.

The Golden Age of Streaming — the era that the Economist magazine is calling a “$650 Billion Binge” — is just starting. Shows like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and Transparent have ushered in a new generation of entertainment marked by its large numbers of international viewers and acclaimed programming. 

When looking at digital rights management vendor, like any major vendor, one of the first things to investigate is how they’ve coped with similar clients. Not only will this give an insight into how they go about their business but also how they deal with various enterprise sizes. Scalability is much talked about but hard to implement and finding a digital rights management vendor with proven abilities to scale up rapidly and meet live event user bursts is crucial.

Content piracy is so big that its impact is felt beyond the bank account — it’s changing business models. Traditionally in the movie business, new releases often stayed in theaters for months to maximize revenues. As digital downloads, and now streaming, have made it easier for content pirates to obtain and distribute illegal copies, movie studios have continually shrunk the release window over the last several years.

After downloading and installing Kodi, users download apps or “add-ons” from piracy ecosystem sites that allow them to stream whatever content is offered from the site. 

The OTT drm service provider receives a request for content, authorizes the user session, then triggers the generation of a secure DRM token. This process is achieved by calling some ExpressPlay multi-DRM APIs and passing all the required parameters to create a DRM license, which includes an identifier of the CEK(s), and desired DRM license policies.

Contrary to protecting a video download or VOD-streamed content with forensic video watermarking technology that was optimized for a non-real-time model, we now face live event instant restreaming piracy, meaning a real-time solution is required. With server-side video watermarking technologies.

Conditional access system work by requiring certain criteria to be met before granting a user access to the content. Here’s a closer look at how conditional access systems work.