Well it was a long time coming if it is true. Entriq, as a subsidiary of the public South African company Naspers blew through a rumored $140M in just 9 years of operation and had a massive turnover problem in their sales/bizdev group year after year. Every show I went to in 2007/2008 I met a new head of BizDev or a new “West Coast Sales Director.”
The company had a strong platform in MediaSphere but suffered from a lack of identity and the need to do it all to book the revenue they needed to justify their cash run. With big customers like NBA, the UFC, Oprah’s Harpo Productions, CBS, BSkyB and many other monolithic media brands, you would have thought they would be rolling in greenbacks.
At some point early last year the company made a decision to get into the content delivery space which, IMHO, was the beginning of the end for them. I just placed a call into their former offices where the phones are now being answered by Irdeto staff with an Irdeto greeting. Doing a search at www.irdeto.com for the term “MediaSphere” pulls up a blank page and a search for the term “Entriq” pulls up exec bios and a Irdeto Support Portal link but nothing about the former company or it’s flagship product.
Paul Raglund is apparently the sole guy left in charge so we will have to see what he says if he returns our emails.
Ok so everyone who knows me knows I dislike Hulu. Actually I resent it as a broken business model that teaches many bad habits to content owners that I spent the past 8 years of my life trying to train out of them. I am confident Hulu will be shut down or turned into a Pay Media model within the year. There is no other viable future for Hulu.
Why give content away for free? If that model works, where did Cable TV and iTunes come from? Why take something that costs millions of dollars to produce and throw it up on the web for free in the hopes ads will cover your _ss?
That being said, I love Dennis Leary and have been watching Rescue Me since day one. There’s something about his Character that I just find very genuine and frank. That’s refreshing.
So I had to do a double take when I first saw news about this paper popping up on ARS Technica and other sites. After reading through it I think it’s patently clear that the author means well but has cloaked her results in an overly verbose and academic wrapper. The title alone is a mouthful: Technological accommodation of conflicts between freedom of expression and DRM, the first empirical assessment by Patrícia Akester, Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge.
I myself would have modified the title to something more readily accessible by people with limited time or interests. Maybe something more catchy like DRM Makes People Steal or something that really throws “it” out there and let’s the reader know they are setting sail on a voyage away from reality.
No, seriously, this is a real effort here that Patricia put forth and everyone should definitely check it out. My personal favorite part is the Data Collection Questions – DRM Developers.
Post-NAB, Microsoft made the move to go ahead and release this list to the public.
PlayReady is a baseline DRM technology that is in process of being deployed across a variety of platforms that Microsoft develops. The first PlayReady experience was included with Nokia handsets to power their music offering.
The next experience that is hitting the market is the Silverlight DRM experience which will provide support for encrypted content for the Silverlight browser plug-in. This is the technology behind Netflix’s offering.
PlayReady is also the technology behind BSkyB’s offerings.
Well it didn’t take long for the shine to wear off of the heavily polished online advertising industry. For years now I have said in public on panels and in blogs and in forums and to potential clients that advertising is an interesting model that only has relevance in a select few niches of online media. Time and time again we have seen advertising-only supported plays make a big PR splash only to make a bigger splash when they fell back to their watery graves.
PaidContent.org has a nice piece on the recent online-advertising “return to earth” today if it’s any indicator of the negative effect ads have had on deploying digital media business models, it’s time the industry at large focused on _selling_ content instead of finding “sponsors” for it. Forget fighting Piracy and forget trying to find ways to give content away with ads. Neither effort will generate enough sustainable revenue to stabilize and grow your business.
Sell your content. Do it today. That’s some free advice from an expert.
According to LinuxCentre.net “you are now able to search, index, download and watch Channel4’s 4oD without Adobe flash on most platforms using the latest release of the open source get_iplayer. And, best of all - it is DRM free…
This is possible thanks to today’s release of rtmpdump v1.5 by Andrej Stepanchuk which now supports adobe’s obfuscated RTMPE protocol.”
Of course there never was any DRM on the Channel4 content as they are not using Adobe’s FMRMS platform and were relying on the RTMPe protocol to protect their offering. I would assume that when Adobe’s true file-level DRM platform comes out later this year, they will switch to it. Adobe has put in a lot of hard work on FMS and FMRMS and I expect that this work will continue to payoff.
Editor’s Note: It bothered me to read that the gentleman who wrote this application WORKS IN THE IT INDUSTRY “as a Senior Linux Systems Administrator for a rather enormous IT company.”
1. Hosting links to this application and furthering the compromise of RTMPe is a no go.
2. I hope you lose your job….tomorrow…. and I hope you realize this “hobby” of yours is harming the welfare of people like yourself around the world.
3. Shame on you.
I also imagine that given the illegality of this application, it won’t be online at this URL long.
Yep you read that right. Finally after a short 8 year hiatus, we now have a DRM Solution for Streaming Content on the Mac platform. These snaps are from a new KeyOS Silverlight DRM Smooth Streaming player we built in the lab. Based on some ground-breaking work we did last week at NAB, we are positioning this product for rollout later next month. Steve Jobs if you are out there, give me a call. I will show you how to really build some momentum over there at Apple outside the iTunes cell.
BuyDRM KeyOS Silverlight player with PlayReady DRM for Smooth Streaming running in Safari on an Intel Mac Acquiring License:
BuyDRM KeyOS Silverlight player with PlayReady DRM for Smooth Streaming running in Safari on an Intel Mac Playing Encrypted Content:
I don’t know about you but I am into portable devices and CTIA is just a mobile tech fanatic’s dream land. Of course you have to wash your hands every hour but it’s worth it.
If you are in Las Vegas at the 2009 CTIA Wireless show this week and want to discuss Microsoft’s new PlayReady technology and how it’s being used in mobile devices and in Silverlight DRM, let me know and we can have someone brief you on that and get your feedback etc.
See you there!
I got so much response about this post FTC DRM Town Hall and in email and conversation this week that I thought I would share what is now my long-held view on the forms of DRM technology.
Christopher Levy’s Propose Classification for Common Forms of DRM:
1. Multimedia DRM: This form of DRM is a file-level wrapper where objects like audio/video files can be remotely unlocked using license keys.
Examples: Apple’s FairPlay DRM, Microsoft Windows Media Rights Manager, Adobe’s Flash Media Rights Manager
2. Application DRM: This form of DRM covers installers/exe/msi files where someone buys or acquires a game/software application which is encapsulated in a key/token/authorization interface to access the program components.
Example: The DRM on the recent SPORE Video Game, SecuROM, and the DRM present on most forms of Microsoft’s software applications.
3. Physical Media DRM: This form of DRM is the most widely-deployed with DVDs around the world utilizing this technology.
Examples: The DeCSS DVD encryption standard used on most mainstream DVDs as well as the infamous Sony RootKit which utilized First4Internet’s Extended Copy Protection (XCP) and SunnComm’s MediaMax CD-3 technologies.
4. Image DRM: This form of DRM typically allows conditional access to encrypted images via a web-browser and attempts to prevent common forms of screen-capture or video buffer dumps.
Examples: The former SealedMedia DRM platform now Oracle’s IRM platform
5. Document DRM: This form of DRM requires a licensing plug-in for common office suites like Microsoft’s Office where documents like word docs, excel sheets, web pages and emails are all encrypted and manged by an intermediary encryption/decryption layer.
Examples: Microsoft’s Informations Right’s Management Platform for Office 2007.
The EFF announced this morning that they are hosting a “panel” titled: “Hollywood, Digital Rights Management, and the Future of Digital Video” but they just forgot to invite anyone from Hollywood, or anyone from the Digital Rights Management Industry or anyone in the business of Selling Digital Video. BUT they are having a panel.
I sat and listened last week as the spokesperson from the EFF spoke at the FTC’s town hall on DRM and I guess I was expecting a stronger fact-based arguement. She clearly respresents some viewpoints held by those wanting to lump all forms of DRM into one industry even though we have entirely different segments, technologies and for the most part, customer bases.
Once the online video is back up you can see my presentation. I will attempt to upload it here later tonight but in the meantime let’s be clear there are three different prevailing forms of DRM. Because they adress significantly different problems for entirely different industries, the discussion about DRM needs to fall with the confines of being relative to the problem it wants to have dialogue about.
Other than having her arguments completely shredded into confetti by numerous attendess she did receive a tennis clap from one guy who said he was a Harvard Fellow researching the “negative effects of DRM” only to later find out he:
a. Wasn’t an expert
b. Had no idea how a modern license delivery platform works
c. Was clueless about the actual business of delivering DRM-managed content.
Not to mention the EFF _conveniently_ didn’t mention one word about the Google Video Fiasco because Google is a _significant_ contributor to the EFF, but they felt it was proper to rail on MSN Music and MLB for doing exactly the same thing.
It’s hard to understand who at the EFF actually comes up with their agenda. They didn’t have a _single_ consumer on hand to testify about their perceived negative effects of DRM and after I made my presentation, they literally had not one question for me or the other panelists. Of course this may be because they left as soon as ARSTechnica posted their lame hit piece.
Hey EFF: If you are reading this, I am formally demanding you provide an open platform for the bi-directional exchange of discourse on the effects of DRM. Your shotgun attempts at assassinating an entire industry are wholely unacceptable and they just further the reality that your organization is not capable of engaging in constructive, fact-based dialogues with the industry and consumers you preport to represent.
