PROTECT YOUR PREMIUM CONTENT WITH A CHOICE OF CONTENT PROTECTION TECHNIQUES: WEB PLAYLISTS, SILVERLIGHT DRM, WINDOWS MEDIA DRM, AND THIRD PARTY DRM PROVIDERS.
With the explosive growth in streaming online video and rich internet experiences it’s critical to ensure your content and your business models are secure. The new peaks in online video audiences create a great opportunity to explore new revenue opportunities but also expose the challenges in managing and protecting valuable media assets. A variety of content protection schemes, including Digital Rights Management (DRM); end-user authentication and authorization; Web Playlists; and SSL ensure that content owners can fully monetize and protect their media assets.
Silverlight DRM, Powered by PlayReady
Silverlight DRM, Powered by PlayReady is a content encryption technology designed and optimized to enable key Silverlight online content distribution scenarios including live streaming, on-demand streaming and progressive download. Unlike simple stream or link encryption technologies (e.g., Adobe’s RTMP/e), Silverlight DRM, encrypts the video and audio in a secure wrapper ensuring content, including advertising, stays protected from server to Silverlight plug-in until it is decompressed during playback.
Silverlight DRM is a small, cross-platform version of the PlayReady client used exclusively by the Silverlight Web browser plug-in. Analogous to other online content services, a Silverlight service that offers protected content uses the PlayReady Server SDK (or alternatively, the WM Rights Manager 10.1 SDK) to first package (encrypt) the Windows Media Audio (WMA) and Windows Media Video (WMV) content. When a consumer then wants to play that content a license is requested and obtained from a license acquisition server that uses the PlayReady Server SDK.
The Silverlight plug-in includes an individualized PlayReady client acquired from an online service, hosted by Microsoft. Individualization binds the run-time client to the computer on which the client was initially installed. Every end-user is given an individualized Playready component and different certified license keys. This significantly reduces the danger of global breaks. If a specific version of a PlayReady client becomes compromised, it can be barred from acquiring licenses for new digital media files unless the latest version of the PlayReady client is downloaded that is robust against the circumvention.
Compatible with Windows Media DRM 10
Silverlight DRM allows content owners to deliver their protected content using either legacy WMDRM10 or new PlayReady encryption. This enables content owners to deliver existing libraries of WMDRM10 content to Silverlight without having to re-encrypt anything and means that the same protected content can be played back in both Silverlight and Windows Media based-clients.
Third Party DRM Providers
With the extensibility and openness of Silverlight 2, third-parties are able to build content protection solutions, extending customer choice and opening up infrastructure options.
PLUG INTO ADAPTIVE STREAMING TECHNOLOGIES FROM MOVE NETWORKS AND OTHER SERVICE PROVIDERS DELIVERING OPTIMIZED, ENHANCED HIGH-DEFINITION VIDEO EXPERIENCES OVERCOMING CHALLENGES PRESENTED BY VARYING INTERNET CONNECTIONS.
The popularity of Internet video has exploded over the last few years. First driven by UGC sites like YouTube, now broadcasters and Hollywood Studios have begun to distribute more high-value, early window content over the Web than ever before. With the availability of this mainstream content comes the expectation from both distributors and consumers that media experiences will be high-quality and glitch-free.
Although traditional video streaming and progressive download techniques can deliver excellent quality media, they both lack to ability to respond to changing network and playback conditions that may adversely affect the viewing experience. To address these issues, companies like MOVE Networks have innovated to take advantage of advanced HTTP-based delivery techniques such as adaptive streaming where video is streamed in multi-second video segments, cached on the network, and then re-packaged on the client. Combining the best aspects of traditional streaming and progressive download, adaptive streaming seamlessly adjusts image quality to fit available bandwidth on each viewer’s Internet connection, creating a high-quality Internet television viewing experience.
In August, Microsoft took an equity stake in MOVE Networks, building upon a strategic partnership announced in March of 2008. The combination of Silverlight and MOVE Networks’ technologies allows users to experience high-quality, skip-free Internet television programming and allows media companies to insert branding, navigation, advertising and other rich interactive elements in and around their Internet television video streams.
The live, online webcast of the Democratic National Convention was the first large demonstration of the integration of Move Networks and Silverlight. It was a technological success and tremendously popular, with visitors to the official convention Web site viewing more than 350,000 hours of video. It allowed viewers to experience the convention online like never before. We’ve heard customers say it was the highest-quality video experience they have ever seen online. 
Microsoft partnered with Move Networks to design, develop, encode and deliver the Democratic National Convention media experience. In a first for a political convention, Silverlight gave live, high quality convention video coverage to a worldwide audience via the DNCC’s Web site. Silverlight multimedia applications provided an all-access pass for the convention’s online audience, offering the opportunity for viewers to individually tailor their convention experiences. The average viewer watched 107 minutes of video and the average bit rate for all video was 1.2 Mbps.
DELIVER THE MOST RELIABLE AND SCALABLE VIDEO WITH THE LOWEST COST OF OWNERSHIP USING WINDOWS SERVER.
Windows Server 2008 is the next-generation server operating system from Microsoft that will help content providers realize new levels of reliability and scalability, all with lower-cost content delivery. Windows Server represents a significant competitive edge when delivering streaming media and/or applications cross-platform and cross-device, and is already in use by most major broadcasters around the world. Feature highlights include:
Windows Media Services 2008
Windows Media Services, like all of Windows Server 2008, is significantly more secure, reliable and robust — and it is already considered by many customers to be the best in the market for live and streaming delivery. The latest improvements provide twice the scalability over Windows Media Services 9.0.
In addition to its proven scalability and reliability, Windows Media Services now supports a Server Core installation, enabling reduced footprints for fixed-function streaming server scenarios, offering embedded appliance-like performance. Additionally, a cache/proxy plug-in is built in, making it easier to configure WMS for edge network enterprise and Internet topologies. Many features of Windows Media Services that were previously available only on Windows Server Enterprise and Datacenter are now available on Windows Server Standard, and all Standard features are now also available on Windows Web Server 2008. This makes the power of Windows Media Services 2008 available to a broader set of users at a lower cost.
Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 Media Pack
The IIS7 Media Pack will bring media-specific features, previously exclusive to dedicated streaming media servers, to a Web server. The first feature of the IIS7 Media Pack is Bit Rate Throttling, which brings intelligence to progressive downloads. Bit Rate Throttling automatically detects the encoded bit rate of each file and controls how fast the first few seconds and then the rest of the stream is downloaded, thus saving network bandwidth while preserving a fast start-up experience for the end user.
With support for Web playlists in IIS7 Media Pack, content owners can monetize their media assets through advertising-supported revenue models. A variety of advertising types, including bumpers, trailers, and interstitial ads, can be dynamic and personalized via integration with ASP.NET servers. Using Web Playlists, content and advertising can be sequenced with obfuscated URLs sent from the server via a client-side playlist. Since media playback experiences cannot be compromised, this ensures that ads are played and content is protected.
