#ott drm

Beyond the legal and ethical considerations, account sharing poses a substantial business challenge for service providers. It affects revenue generation and the ability to measure viewership data for content valuation and advertising purposes. It becomes imperative for service providers to address this issue promptly.

Although these legacy technologies are gradually becoming outdated and will eventually need to be replaced, they’re still forming a considerable part of the content protection technology stack of traditional pay-TV operators,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.

Golden age of streaming service providers also must contend with the fragmentation within the generations of operating systems. This is especially challenging when it comes to dealing with Android devices, which in the smartphone sector accounts for 87% of the global user base according to International Data Corporation (IDC). 

To provide for the considerable needs of copyright holders and enforcing content licensing agreements, a number of DRM vendors have sprung up. Like any key partnership choice, a major decision facing content providers and OTT streaming operators is which digital rights management vendor can deliver the best DRM solution for their specific needs.

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.

As shown by the scale of loss estimates, piracy ecosystem is a big business that leverages the same advances in streaming, asset management, advertising support, and other components of legitimate OTT operations.

The live sports watermarking world is a direct threat to sports teams’ sponsorship deals. Because sports organisations are unable to include pirated audiences in their audience estimates, the numbers of viewers are grossly under-reported.

The next step is to protect content once it arrives at its intended legitimate destination. To ensure that playback devices are secure, in comes forensic watermarking. Described simply, a video watermark is an embedded overlay that identifies ownership.

The least technically sophisticated approaches that pirates use to get around the robust protection of sophisticated ott drm systems include high-quality camcording from 4K UHD TV displays. Advanced methods, similar to those of professional pirates, include high-bandwidth digital content protection (HDCP) strippers.