A DRM report from research company In-Stat says the US has to shift from content protection to a two-pronged content monetization strategy ‘ use DRM technology, mostly watermarking to ensure some level of protection and trying to create a better user experience than illegal P2P services.
This also happened to be Steve Job’s message when he launched iTunes Music store, he said at the time he had found a way to compete with piracy because it was a better experience than P2P downloading.
In-Stat says that efforts to stop the 12 billion illegal P2P downloads each year have come up short.
‘What is needed is a new approach to monetizing digital content including moving a relatively small group of consumer households that do the bulk of P2P downloading (power users), to legal services,’ says Keith Nissen, In-Stat analyst. ‘The question is whether the video industry wishes to control its own destiny, or get crushed by technological change, similar to what is occurring in the music business.’
In-Stat said that US broadband households download 14 billion videos each year and 85% are illegal but it sees watermarking as becoming the right way to track licensed usage rights and points out that if the industry could covert all the power user households from P2P to legal video it would generate around $1.4 billion in subscription revenue as well as $1.1 billion in advertising revenue.
The report says that it analyses multiple digital rights management technologies, including content protection, conditional access, fingerprinting, watermarking, and rights lockers.
Well not much of that is new, except that one of the more listened to US technology researchers is saying it, rather than civil rights campaigners, so it has a slightly better chance of being heard.
Interestingly IndiePix this week, a New York based distributor of independent films, says it has implemented very much this sort of system using watermarking technology from San Jose firm Pixel Tools to go with its own download and burn system.
All of IndiePix’s films offered for download are now embedded with a watermark which mean that if any copy turns up in the wild (on the internet) it can be tracked back to the original disc and the initial download transaction.
Interestingly there are many suppliers of this type of technology and they all claim to have ‘unique’ patents, including this one from Pixel Tools. Certainly Widevine and Verimatrix have their own systems, mostly for IPTV set tops, and Macrovision has something similar, while Philips claims to own many of the basic patents, in watermarking as well as in digital fingerprinting, and uses it in its VTrack software, which is used widely in digital cinema, which probably led to the whole idea of content companies being okay with it as a technology.