We said when the ink was barely dry on the legal action from Widevine targeting Verimatrix, that it was stuff and nonsense and so it has turned out to be. The suit was brought in 2007 and focused on patents awarded to Widevine just weeks earlier. The suit has now been quietly dropped, an event we picked up in a sparsely worded release from Verimatrix, which looks like the two companies have agreed to say almost nothing about settlement details.
The thrust of those patents was that it had secured ownership on partial encryption, the practice of leaving headers in the clear, while encrypting the bulk of the content. This is done in order to better navigate video content for VoD and DVR files. We said at the time that this was quite ridiculous because every conditional access system, including those that come from industry majors NDS, Motorola and Nagravision, had always done this and those products pre-dated Widevine’s existence.
Quotes from Verimatrix CEO Tom Munro at the time put it best, ‘What Widevine seems to be claiming is that any stream of content must be either entirely encrypted or not encrypted at all, and that it solely invented the idea of partial encryption. That denies the entire past work on MPEG2 Transport Streams, the DVB encryption process and every version of DRM that enables trick play.’ The same can be said for 3GPP streaming encryption. Verimatrix immediately asked for a re-examination of the patents, since the prior art was so huge in this area.
Interestingly Widevine never attacked anyone else with the patents, only coming after its arch-rival in IPTV. That’s a bit like saying that it was scared of the ‘big guns’ such as NDS, Nagra, Motorola and Irdeto, and was only fighting it out for dominance in a small but growing sub-sector that makes up perhaps 3% of the global pay TV market.
Also interestingly Widevine never went after Verimatrix over one technology area they both claim as a major differentiator, the practice of watermarking video. Verimatrix and Widevine both announced this capability a few weeks from one another at around the time of IBC in September 2005. They work very differently from one another as we understand it, and Verimatrix this week confirmed to us that it had been awarded patents in this area and that its system had been widely, but secretly, licensed to other players.
Its system embeds a single graphic somewhere in the entire video, selecting different parts of the screen and different data features in which to embed it. The graphic once recompiled is usually a picture of the serial number of the device which created the video.
The truth is that every single DRM offering which has chased IPTV has realized that either the MPEG2 transport stream packet headers have to be in the clear, or that I-Frames need to be in the clear, or that something needs to be in the clear so that anything which happens to the video, such as storing it, re-organizing its packet order, synchronizing it with sound or fast forwarding on a DVR, can be achieved, without decoding it. Each of the suppliers do this in slightly different ways, but it has certainly been used for longer than the existence of Widevine as a company, so its ‘partial encryption’ patent was always unlikely to prove valid in the long run.
Putting aside this suit deals with patent numbers 7,165,175 and 7,376,831. Already a later suit brought by Widevine in 2008, lodged using its 7,299,292 patent, which describes a process and streaming server for encrypting a data stream to a virtual smart card client system, was dismissed by a court last year. There were no details given out about payments made one way or another, but our guess would be that no money changed hands (unless it was for legal costs) and that the two rivals have not signed a general patent sharing agreement, so the potential for other suits to emerge, around different patents remains in play.
Verimatrix at the launch of VCAS 2.0 added patents to authenticate the broadband line a set top is attached to, watermarking, and something called Quantum authentication, which uses the customer behavior to form part of decryption keys.
Widevine recently has been making a lot of noise about it picking up deals to help encrypt TV Everywhere services, where pay TV companies offer the same content free over the internet. But it may have neatly shot itself in the foot here given that there is an investigation into these services in the US and it may have invested prematurely. There is a chance that they will never be allowed to come to market.
It also has a deal encrypting the on demand online film service of Blockbuster. One of Widevine’s claims to fame is that it was one of three DRMs used in the CinemaNow deployment under its new owner, Sonic Solutions (which also underpins the Blockbuster system), and that it could cope with domain level authentication for multiple devices in the home, and could work with an online rights locker like the one coming out from DECE the Sony inspired DRM initiative.
Talking to Verimatrix at the IPTV World Forum this week it told us that it now had 280 customers, from the smallest Hotel chain to tier one telcos the size of KPN, Belgacom and TeliaSonera. It also announced new deals at the show with Philippines broadcaster ABS-CBN which is the largest DVB-S satellite broadcaster in the Philippines and operates satellite and web delivered programming, for Philippines living abroad, all around the world.
The deal is global, and reflects more and more the tendency of video services to be more and more hybrid. The VCAS software version that Verimatrix has delivered is cardless, which works for both DVB systems and over the public internet, from a single conditional access server.
A similar system has just gone into TelstraClear in New Zealand, where the cable TV operator has moved away from smart card based protection now that it has an IP return path on its digital cable, which it can use for frequent re-authentication of the service. Again this is a hybrid approach between DVB-C and IP. The entire show at IPTV World Forum was pushing the idea of hybrid architectures for broadcasting and Over The Top services.