Importance of DRM and choosing the perfect DRM vendor

Digital Rights Media or DRM is an approach to avoid illegal redistribution of media content and restrict the practices followed by unauthorized consumers to copy and download the content.

Source: https://www.memedroid.com/memes/tag/piracy

DRM is mostly used by Content Providers/Creators who have spent millions of dollars to generate good amount of revenue and avoid content modification and duplication. Other than content providers there are multiple places where DRM is used:

1. Movie Producers use DRM to restrict users to watch complete ad in video without skipping it.
2. Music Providers use it to avoid music streaming and download on multiple devices
3. Sometimes Gaming companies make use of DRM to restrict download on more than single device.

DRM considers two important aspects:

1. Licensing Agreements
2. Encryption to control access and reproduce required information

Powerful AES-128 Encryption:

Advanced Encryption Standard using block size of 128 bits is a strong encryption module for protecting premium content including movies, music and games. It is the only publicly available encryption module suggested by the National security Agency. All Content protection technologies including HLS, RTMP to DRM such as Widevine and Fairplay uses AES-128 encryption.

Source: https://www.encoding.com/digital-rights-management-drm/

Handling Multiple aspects of DRM from Software, hardware to multiple format support is tough task so there are number of certified DRM vendors are available which can reduce this headache but what are the factors that need to be considered in selecting a perfect DRM Vendor.

1. How Long has the company been in the business of providing DRM support to Different content Providers be it small or big.
2. Company should be capable of supporting multiple formats of content.
3. There has to be multiple DRM support according to the operating system ranging from playready of Microsoft, widevine of Google to fairplay of Apple. Vendor should be able to give support for all.
4. Check the history of deployments. Vendor should have a good record of deployments.
5. Last and the final one that can be considered as one of the important one is to be flexible in providing support and simplifying the process of setting it up.

Following are the basic aspects that can be considered for selecting DRM Provider:

1. Restriction on content type(video, audio, .mp3, .pdf).
2. user specific, device specific, location specific, time specific restriction.
3. Backend Technologies that can be integrated.
4. 3rd party player integration.
5. Pricing.

So, finally it depends upon individual’s requirements that which DRM can match and fulfil the needs.