Adobe this week launched its own challenge to Window Mobile DRM and the Microsoft PlayReady DRM extension that it hopes will conquer the mobile handset. But with 500 million copies of Adobe Flash Lite out on handsets and other portable devices, if the company can get the green light from major studios to its DRM technology, it is sure to hold its lead in the online and portable device video market.
And as usual Adobe sure knows where the money is, because this week’s announcement of its own Digital Rights Management system for Flash video, takes its age old business model ‘ free to consumers, with paid for tools to suppliers ‘ with which it has built its $multi-billion empire.
A list price of $40,000 per CPU is the only major cost of deploying DRMed Flash Video content to as many customers as a video service wishes, and as such it is probably one of the only really expensive software tools that online video services will be queuing for.
The great bulk of editing suite and playout pieces of software are in the $200 to $400 price range, but in order to handle the types of paid content, such as major motion pictures and expensive TV series, and offer them up for not just streaming on the web, but also to copy and store onto a remote PC, and be fairly sure that the same video will not suddenly appear on YouTube that same afternoon.
Interestingly the studios are unlikely to be able to refuse their blessing to this new software, because it is based on the same technology as Windows Media DRM, and it was a development we foresaw when a bland statement from DRM intellectual property leader Intertrust last July said that Adobe had entered into a license agreement for its content protection technology. We asked as the time, ‘Will Adobe drive the biggest deployment of DRM clients in history?’
Intertrust is owned by Sony and Philips, and patented many of the basic techniques for DRM, and received a $400 million payment from Microsoft as an out of court settlement in 2004, for a ten year license to its technology.
Over the past six years or so the fight to control Digital Rights Management technology has waged, with Microsoft bundling technology into its media player, Apple hiding its music content behind Fairplay and legal wranglings between everyone. So although Adobe has been involved in document based DRM, entirely under its own design, it needed to emulate the approach that Microsoft took, in giving away its DRM to consumers, and building it into the delivery platform, in this case its AIR run time environment.
AIR is now a common run time for Adobe’s Flash, and Acrobat as well as its new Media Player, a direct challenge to Windows Media Player, but playing FLV Flash video files. Adobe Integrated Runtime Environment or AIR is an engine that sits on a PC, a Mac or a Linux device or a handset, and it shares the workload with a server in serving up multimedia experiences across the internet. So a single service can talk to multiple screens.
The DRM software is aimed at broadcasters and media companies who are looking to deliver and protect video that can be viewed both online and offline, the new server integrates into existing and emerging media delivery workflows, the company said.
The big problem has been that the company has invested in a huge upgrade from simple Flash video, to an entire Media Player which allows HD content, screen resizing and storage of content on a PC, just so that paid content could be delivered and not just YouTube style videos, using Adobe technology. But in order to do any of that, the run time environment had to be bomb proof to the average everyday pirate, if not the professional.
And the fact that the announcement cites Sony Pictures Entertainment, saying it looks forward to exploring secure distribution models with Adobe, implies that there is yet another studio accepted DRM on the block, even if it is priced at $40,000 for both the Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat Linux versions.
Very probably the Adobe system is based on the skeleton coding of Intertrust, which offers its own Marlin implementation of its patents for basing an entire DRM on.
The thing about letting Adobe win this market for online and mobile DRM is that to consumers the tools will be free, but unlike the Microsoft product it doesn’t present an intellectual property threat to all of the consumer electronics businesses, all the handset makers and all the PC suppliers that want to incorporate it.
The beauty of this coming from Adobe, is that no-one in the food chain feels threatened by an encroaching giant. Sure it has wrested control of web video from Microsoft, so that company is upset and wants to get it back, hence the Silverlight iteration of its media products, designed as an Adobe Flash look alike. This is also an assault on Apple, which for years has slowly insinuated itself into the professional film making process. But everyone else is likely to welcome Adobe with open arms and a fully DRM protected media player will have a huge impact on web video and streamed cellular video, and who knows, even on TV set tops.
We talked last year to John Landwehr, Director of Security Solutions and Strategy at Adobe, and he told us, ‘Today we have Flash Video in the browser. When our Media Player comes off beta we will offer the ability to download files and play them offline, not just as a stream over the Internet, and that has to give way to a whole lot of new business models. We have to have the technology to support download to own, download to rent, content that is locked to a user or a user location, and advertising supported free video, where the adverts can’t be stripped out.’
And this of course is why Adobe wanted that Intertrust license, because it gives it shortcuts to many of these capabilities over the critical development period in the next year or two.
Just how Landwehr achieves all of this isn’t something he went into a lot of detail about, but he discussed some of it. ‘Flash video was first experienced in the browser, but by the addition of our own media player, FLV files can be captured and replayed outside the browser where both the pipe and the data inside the PC remain encrypted. They require authentication from the player with the usual username and password protection to play a file, but content owners will also be able to lock it to that PC only.’
A common module called Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) converts the streams to SWF (ShockWaveFlash) files, which are only controlled by a SWF Player piece of software such as the media player. These have to be architected to never allow unencrypted content to be cached anywhere on the device, which is the standard way for a ‘streaming’ protocol to be ‘cheated’ into giving up its content.
‘It is tightly integrated with the video decoder, and then immediately hands video over to the device screen,’ said Landwehr.
The Flash video is then played under the control of a secure script written in the playlist W3C XML markup language Smile. If the script says play a pre-roll advert and then play the video, the player can’t show the video in any other order, and can’t drop the pre-roll ad and if it tries to, nothing will play.
Landwehr is confident that end users cannot gain access to the Smile code, so cannot strip the advert out.
‘There is only so much you can do with content protection, because someone can always point a camera at the screen, play the video, and make a copy, but we try never to let anything be ‘seen’ by the operating software, and keep it all hidden inside the player, to make it as tough to break as possible.’
This set up is clearly aimed at addressable advertising systems, so that each viewers’ system can call a local or remote advert, which might be different from anyone else watching the same system. All of which becomes a reality with the launch of this server, so expect a new wave of commercial services based on it, any time soon.