OTT video specialist Kaltura says that it has cracked the problem of a Universal DRM, although that’s not really what it’s done, not really. It has simply created a work-around for its existing operator clients when they update to browser versions which don’t support plug-ins.
There must be a number of OTT changes in DRM systems around the world which have done this, and done it this month, because April is the designated changeover for new versions of Chrome to drop support for Google, disabling NPAPI the original plugin interface specified by Netscape and still used globally on most browsers.
This all goes back to when HTML was created, to include video play natively, and therefore no video player plug-in was needed. Take away the plug in and you take away the ability for most DRM’s to be decrypted by the browser.
What each of the browser makers are doing – Google, Apple, Microsoft – is specifying a standard approach to how encryption works and making it suit their own systems, in Google’s case it owns Widevine, so it will only accept licenses in its own specified format. Eventually Kaltura will make a change to the way its licenses are delivered to cater for this, but as an interim measure it has had an extension written into its app by German DRM specialist CastLabs, a company the specialize in multi-DRM systems, to take out Playready licenses and replace them with licenses from Widevine. And it can do the same for MPEG DASH.
As a result Kaltura’s Modular DRM delivers a single file, readable cross-browser and cross-platform and this includes older browsers supporting Adobe and Silverlight via a plugin translation layer.
The Kaltura video player also now supports client-side translation of existing Smooth Streaming streams into DASH common encryption for playback in Chrome/Internet Explorer browsers that support the HTML5 EME standard.
We asked if this invoked some weakness in the system, and Michael Dale, Senior Director of Product at Kaltura, insisted it didn’t. Essentially the actual decryption is from the Common Encryption Scheme (CENC) which specifies encryption and key mapping methods for multi-DRM to enable decryption of the same file using different DRM systems. This is more or less how every multi-DRM system works right now and companies like Verimatrix have had to use much the same standard approach.
The problem is not knowing when your customer upgrades their browser to one that will no longer support plug-ins, so you have to be able to work either way.
The scheme operates by defining a common format for the encryption related metadata necessary to decrypt the protected streams, yet leaves the details of rights mappings, key acquisition and storage, DRM compliance rules, up to the DRM system.
So while Kaltura claims it is first to market we think that most providers have taken this in their stride over the preceding months and are watching this process with both interest and increasing frustration.
In a separate announcement Kaltura said this week that it has open sourced its video library for HLS (HTTP Live Streaming) playback on Android devices. This is a critical feature of most OTT networks, since Google is less worried about ABR formats on its OS, than Apple. For Kaltura this is a clear attempt to become the “de facto” method for playing HLS on Android devices, which will also get it benefits in robustness from the open source community. Kaltura is complementing this with the launch of an open source Flash HLS library.