The animosity demonstrated between Widevine and the rest of the IPTV DRM community just had to spill over at some point, and the accusation that its closest rival Verimatrix, has breached one of its patents emerged this week, which is likely to see the two in court eventually.
While Faultline does not have details of the specifics of the patent holdings of both companies, we have dealt with each of them over the years. Both have an AES standards based encryption system, both have elected to leave all I-frame and transport information in the clear, a form of selective encryption, and both offer watermark systems to track content if it is subsequently pirated and finds its way onto the internet. Widevine says that it has 8 issued patents and 45 pending.
Verimatrix has been quick to deny the accusations and says that the suit may
have been filed, but no copy has reached it yet, but feels so strongly, that it wanted to issue a public statement denying the allegations now, rather than wait.
Verimatrix says its confident that its products and technologies do not infringe on Widevine’s patents and will vigorously defend itself against Widevine’s unsupported claims and goes on to claim that it is outperforming Widevine both technically and in the marketplace.
It looks very much like the process of just what is kept in the clear and just what part of a video stream is encrypted is at the heart of the issue, and their two strategies are very similar. But this is also similar to other Conditional Access systems and this looks to us like a customer win spilling over from the market place into the courts.
We also know that Verimatrix brought a number of unique ideas to DRM in its last version of VCAS, adding location software using DSLAM references and user data as part of the decryption key, neither of which we have heard of being used elsewhere.
Widevine has called for unspecified damages and the company says it has made overtures to Verimatrix to license the technology. Both Widevine and Verimatrix claim to be the market leader in independent DRM, and both of them currently have a lead over Microsoft in terms of the number of IPTV encrypted set tops operational which use their respective systems, but Microsoft should shortly overtake them both given its tier 1 customer base.