Live Internet Television

DRM is broken.

Artificially impeding the ability to share digital content makes as much sense as attempting to keep people from reading used books. Content owners should quit trying to keep people from distributing content at their own cost. Ask any content owner: They would love to have free distribution. Provided, of course, that they can monetize their content.

Copyright owners have been improperly taken down a rabbit hole by technology companies promising to protect their content the wrong way. DRM restricts the user experience which, in turn, drives users to seek pirated or illegally distributed DRM-free content.

Once we agree that DRM is not a viable solution, we’re free to look at the problem through a different lens.

First, let’s state the goal. Content owners want to control the use of their content. Usually, this means they want to be paid for it.

Second, lets discuss how we achieve it. How do we allow people to easily view and distribute content, while ensuring that content owners can control and monetize the use of that content?

Enter ivi’s Streaming Block Encryption, the right way to protect copyright.

Here is the approach:

1) Allow peer sharing

a) Shift distribution cost to consumer
b) Encourage word-of-mouth promotion

2) Support individual subscription, ppv, and rental models

a) Assign an individualized, trackable identification to each player
b) Track content and time based access for each player

3) Make it easy for the consumer

a) Users are able to say the following: “I’ve paid for it, I can view it.”
b) And “I can share it with others, as long as they’ve paid for it.”

ivi’s proprietary protection system encodes and encrypts content into the .ivi format. This format is only viewable on ivi TV, a live TV player application that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Every ivi TV player is uniquely identified and is programmed to securely pull rapidly rotating decoding keys from the ivi trackers over SSL, then decrypt and decode the content to each individual viewer’s screen.

The .ivi format is encrypted data, viewable only in the ivi TV player, so it can be shared, duplicated, and distributed. However, the shared .ivi files are only viewable on ivi TV. Therefore, the ivi TV player will only allow the shared content to be viewed if it is designated as “free” or if the subsequent viewer has paid for access to that particular shared content.

This “downloadable conditional access system” component to the ivi system has elicited the following response from Stephen Dukes, former VP of Technology from TCI Cable: “ivi solved what the cable industry has spent millions of dollars trying to solve.”

Allow us to now address some of the anticipated questions about security:

a) Yes, every ivi TV player is a self-contained binary.
b) Yes, each ivi TV player has an embedded cryptographically signed certificate.
c) Yes, content is stored locally, in an encrypted format.
d) Yes, you need a key to decrypt content.
e) Yes, that key changes, as it rotates every few minutes.
f) Yes, content is decrypted in secure memory.
g) Yes, keys are transmitted via SSL just-in-time for decrypting.
h) Yes, ivi has its own Certificate Authority.
i) Yes, ivi uses the highest encryption supported today.
j) Yes, you have to always be online to view content.

Despite all the strategy and protections outlined above, there are still those who will say, “Impressive, but what about the Analog Loop?”

The Analog Loop is a shorthand term that describes content pirates who film their TV screen or computer monitor directly with a video camera. The Analog Loop tends to affect theater movies, pre-release movies, and DVD screeners. Costly DRM approaches to solving the Analog Loop include providing different physical copies with visible “on-screen bug” to each authorized viewer.

ivi addresses the Analog Loop problem, not by distributing costly different physical copies, but instead by a video overlay with the individualized player identification, date, time, IP address, assigned to each authorized viewer’s ivi TV player. Then, any unauthorized filming of the ivi TV player screen would identify the individual person responsible for the unauthorized cam-rip. Because ivi controls the individualized on screen display, authorized viewers will think twice about utilizing the Analog Loop, for fear of being outed and subsequently punished.

Every content owner that uses the ivi system to distribute their channel, content, or programs, gets all this content protection built in. Best of all, the ivi system allows content owners to control and thereby monetize the use of their content online.

ivi is Internet TV done right.

Pew Internet Research

Back in September, we took a reader poll of who we think watches the most online video, by age. Voters favored  “People & young parents 25-34″ over other age ranges. Before we dig into that answer, let’s recognize the fact that video watching online is growing rapidly among all age ranges. Pew Internet breaks it down:

9 in 10 internet users ages 18-29 use video sharing sites. 36% of young adult internet users watched video on these sites.

Online adults ages 30-49 also showed big gains over the past year; 67% now use video sharing sites.

Among internet users ages 50-64, 41% now say they watch video on sites like YouTube

27% of wired seniors ages 65 and older now access video on these sites

Regarding who watches the most online video, a teaser from Nielsenwire:

People have a hard time believing 60% of online video viewers are over the age of 35. Initially, it is a bit shocking: we expect that new media like online video would be more heavily composed of younger people. But the truth of the matter is that video has already reached popularity to the point that the video universe, in broad terms, looks much like the overall Internet audience.

Cutting to the chase…

Here’s how you voted on the categories being the largest (still more apologies for my attempt a dry wit with “fogies”):

It looks like we skewed young by a few years, and underestimated older viewers. Here’s what recent research indicates is the breakdown by age for online video watching:

Time to get excited about things to come!

TV content has every business reason to move online.

For example:

Boomers would be willing to give up their subscription TV service if they could get the same programming online.

By a five-to-one margin Boomers are watching less traditional TV than they did a year ago. Among this group, 62% say it’s because they’re not as interested in what’s on TV these days, and another 26% say they’re spending more time surfing the web.

…

Among traditional TV viewers, 20% of survey respondents say they would be likely to downgrade or cancel their current TV service package in the next six months. The likelihood of canceling is highest among cable (22%) and satellite subscribers (22%), and lowest among fiber-optic TV subscribers (7%).

When asked which one paid subscription – among all media choices – they’d be most willing to give up, 44% selected TV service, which fared significantly worse than any other subscription service.

YouTube’s doing its best to combat popular opinion and convince people it’s ready for professional content delivered with monetization. YouTube has a mindboggling amount of great and varied content, and is enjoyed by millions. But it is Web-based, which means vulnerability to copyright issues and inherent scalability problems.

PC  Advisor has some good commentary:

These PR folk are clearly following up on last week’s earnings  conference call, in which Google CFO Patrick Pichette said YouTube would be “very profitable” in the not-too-distant future. Questions abound, though, including the amount of money it must cost to run such a massive video-sharing site. The YouTube Biz Blog does not care for such concerns.

…

We’ll concede one debunked myth: that the site’s content is grainy and of poor quality. That just depends on what you’re looking at, and there’s nothing stopping anyone from uploading an HD clip.

Look, until YouTube actually does turn a profit, there’s going to be criticism and questions, and Google has every right to address them. But I wouldn’t call the latest effort mythbusting. Let’s take it for what it really is: spin.

Those are good points, too.