Streaming Media - October/November 2007 - (Page 50) All of this hype aside, and as shocking as it sounds, the music industry’s woes are great for the press and provide a lot of fodder for writers and publishers to create ad impressions on websites—and that’s about it. The music industry is not and has never been a pacesetter for the broader online video marketplace or digital media industry at large. Therefore we have to look past its current situation and search out the broader implications of deploying DRM technology for profit and long-term growth. So let’s set the record straight: DRM is alive and well and still a key technology in use by content owners and licensees, media distribution businesses, and pay-media portals around the globe. This past year has seen a startling number of media monoliths deploy new DRM-enabled offerings—including NBA.com offering the entire NBA Finals; UFC.com providing unlimited access to payper-view fights online; and American Idol selling full-length music downloads from the wildly successful TV show on AmericanIdol.com. TV New Zealand even got into the act with its award-winning TVNZ on-demand service. If you still have doubts, look no further than the notorious P2P technology company BitTorrent, which recently launched a DRM-enabled offering with full-length movies and TV shows from several major studios and networks. To top it off, RealNetworks and MTV announced Rhapsody America, which will continue a longstanding tradition at both companies of utilizing DRM for selling their pay-media content. Suffice it to say DRM continues to be one of a few technologies that enable some form of portable and flexible control over the usage of digital media. The technology is in play in some form across literally thousands of websites. Let’s take a look at the major DRM technology players today. DRM demystified Adobe Flash DRM At NAB in April 2007, Adobe rolled out several upgrades to its Flash Media Server 2 that are DRM-like and provide greater security for Flash Video objects. If you are providing Flash content as a progressive download, users can record the content from the cache in their web browser using a “ripper.” However, streaming the content using the proprietary Adobe Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) results in increased protection from rippers. From Adobe’s website: “By default, content delivered by Flash Media Server is wrapped inside an Adobe protocol called RTMP Because this is an . unpublished, proprietary format, none of the RTSP stream ripping programs have the capability to rip media delivered over Flash Media Server.” Adobe also supports simple domain and IP authentication schemas as well as SSL to further enhance the security of Flash content. 50 STREAMING MEDIA October/November 2007 http://NBA.com http://UFC.com http://AmericanIdol.com
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