Verimatrix has been busy, and should have won a prize for issuing the most press releases at IBC, although if you take out the two about contract wins, it was down to around 7 and one of those, perhaps the most important, we covered a few weeks back, its deal with Envivio and Edgeware to develop a fast track set of OTT tools.
At the time this threesome said that it was working with a major IPTV implementer with the combination of Verimatrix conditional access, Envivio encoders and Edgeware VoD servers and we assumed that due to the clash between Ericsson’s Tandberg TV encoder business and Envivio, it couldn’t be Ericsson, but it turns out that this is just the company that IS working on an OTT implementation deal with them.
Verimatrix also used the show to announce availability for ViewRight, its Web client family, built around a number of portable security apps which provide authentication services for HTTP Live Streaming ‘ so think of a common secure access system working on an iPad, iPhone or iPod, as well as on Android (with some help from some RealNetworks with its HTTP LIVE for Android), and also set tops. Verimatrix is also offering its ViewRight LIVE application as a fast track way for pay TV operators to launch content services to these devices, and this offers an app framework so operators can customize and brand broadcast channels and VOD services.
But the area that Verimatrix VP of marketing, Steve Christian was perhaps most excited about was the deal with RCDb (Related Content Database). The RCDb software platform is being used by US studios to take advantage of the Blu-ray Java BD route out of disk players to the internet and Verimatrix will prepare and serve encryption keys for this service and handle device authentication to protect streaming.
‘There will be 50 million blu-ray players out there by 2011,’ said Christian, ‘and every time someone authenticates for the first time using this service, we get a royalty payment.’ Increasingly blu-ray content providers are using the players simply as a route into online content, streaming content from a virtual file system, that is designed to make it look to the player like a Disk. ‘That makes online look like a Blu-ray disk with infinite capacity,’ said Christian.
Verimatrix’ IPTV DRM rival Widevine has made a lot of noise about getting in on these types of deals, with a Blu-ray deal with Samsung for the same kind of online protection, and has been lobbying to take a big slice of TV Everywhere contracts with cable TV companies. Both companies see these low cost consumer electronics based business models likely to lead to vastly larger installed clients than their original IPTV base.
Another thing Christian was keen to talk about was Marlin, the off the shelf DRM in a box, complete with intellectual property rights, which comes from Intertrust. Marlin has been chosen by the Digital TV Group in the UK to protect the Canvas over the top player, and each TV channel in the UK will have to have a Marlin server. Marlin is a sophisticated, top end renewable DRM system, which supports local domains of devices. Verimatrix has licensed the Intertrust technology and was showing Marlin from its stand, though funnily enough it did not put out a release on this.
Verimatrix also embraced yet another DRM system from yet another player, in the form of Microsoft’s PlayReady, interestingly Microsoft is one of the other few Intertrust licensees (along with operators like Telefonica and Vodafone).
Verimatrix has licensed PlayReady so that it can provide an integrated MultiRights system transparently supporting more than one DRM at a time from the same license server for OTT operators.
So we can see that Verimatrix, far less publicly than say Widevine, but just as astutely, is preparing for the coming OTT age and the PlayReady deal puts it in the frame for business from established PlayReady users such as Netflix, BSkyB’s Sky Player, Yahoo! Japan and Canal+ among others. Also the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) has already selected PlayReady as one of the DRM technologies it will support.
Finally Verimatrix said that it has a new collaborative solution built with encoder partner Harmonic for the HTTP Live Streaming adaptive bitrate standard to offer secure video services to the iPhone, iPad, PC and a range of other devices. The system uses Harmonic’s MediaPrism Convergence Suite alongside the Verimatrix VCAS.