Protecting media content

To deliver TV and other media services, telcos have traditionally concerned themselves with their networks. More recently, they are trying to understanding the headend, an essential content processing component. It's a smart move: The video delivery network and the headend are among the largest capital expenditures a telco will undertake.  Another piece of infrastructure that is often overlooked—but is just as important as the network and the headend—are the applications and systems that protect media content from theft and piracy.

To the uninitiated, piracy may not be a particularly exciting topic, but it keeps content owners up late at night and has propelled an industry of content protection technologies. For the U.S. movie industry alone, it’s a $3 billion problem. It’s well known that the content owners’ corporate parents—the major media conglomerates—also have technology holdings that play some part in the delivery and protection of media content. Since these same parent companies also own cable or satellite television networks, observers of the cable industry are pretty familiar with content protection.  But telcos don't really understand the importance of content protection.

Movie piracy has historically been associated with camcording in movie theatres; now it can be done in the context of a digital broadcast, video-on-demand or customer premises equipment environment.  Among the content protection approaches used in digital media distribution networks are:

• Encryption: the modification of content so that it cannot be viewed without a decoder or decryptor.  In the old days, these were called “cable scramblers.” Today, they use complex mathematical algorithms to make content unusable unless decoded.

• Conditional Access (CA) systems: This is a link between the service provider and a smart card or software process running in the subscriber’s set-top box to authenticate the subscriber.  Under the condition that the subscriber has been authenticated and authorized, the system will then grant access to the programming; for instance, turn off the encryption.  Irdeto Access and NDS are among those offering CA solutions to IP network operators and telcos.

• Digital Rights Management (DRM): An approach where usage rules and rights information are stored in a centralized location and associated with identifiers embedded with the content. When someone wants to use the content, a transaction occurs between the user and the content host, to enforce the rules and authenticate the user.  Microsoft, Apple, Real Networks and others offer DRM systems.

• Steganography: Also known as watermarking, a way to hide embedding identifying information within a piece of content in such a way that it cannot be discerned by the viewer.  If watermarked content somehow escaped a DRM or CA environment, it could still be traced back to the owner or to any point in the distribution framework that has implemented a watermarking technology.  A watermark with the ability to trace content to a source is referred to as a “fingerprint.”  Macrovision is one of the better-known suppliers.

Over the past several years, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group and other content industry players have pressured the U.S. Federal government to mandate content protection.  In a series of Content Protection Status Reports issued in 2002, it recommended three approaches to content protection that align with the content protection categories described above. They are asking for:

• a “broadcast flag” to protect against unauthorized retransmission of TV;

• a solution to the “analog hole problem,” wherein digital content (TV, movies or audio; DVDs, video-on-demand) may be converted to analog and back to digital to defeat embedded protection measures, then duplicated or redistributed; and

• a solution to illegal file copying and distribution via peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. 

“Hollywood needs to provide customers with new ways to buy what they want and the studios must find digital locks on entertainment content to bar people who don’t pay,” " says Disney Chief Operating Officer Robert Iger, reflecting the concerns of the movie industry. He also says that Disney will try “a lot of new technologies” to meet this goal.

In response, the FCC issued a landmark ruling on Nov. 4 that requires support by July 2005 for the broadcast flag in consumer electronics devices that have digital tuners and also allows broadcasters to use the flag at their discretion. Many in the information technology community, along with Fair Use advocates and media activists, immediately spoke out against this move and are mounting awareness campaigns aimed at consumers and lawmakers urging resistance against mandates that relate to the other two content protection approaches.

Regardless of your own point-of-view on this subject, it’s clear that content protection is complicated and the approaches to it are rapidly changing. Industry pressures are increasing. For at least a year, there have been reports that some content suppliers require service providers to commit to a content protection strategy.

Certainly, all video service providers should have content protection and the corresponding infrastructure expenditures on their radar screens. It will make content acquisition easier by alleviating the concerns of content owners. And soon, content protection will be the law.

Steve Hawley is principal consulting analyst of Advanced Media Strategies.  He can be reached via e-mail at steve@tvstrategies.com.

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NOTE: There will be no Analyst's Corner column posted next week because of the Thanksgiving holiday. Stay tuned for Peter Bernstein's next column, which will be online Friday, December 5.