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.
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Time to get excited about things to come!