Protecting your Videos with DRM

This topic covers how to protect your videos with the Video Cloud Digital Rights Management (DRM) feature. Video Cloud offers two ways of protecting your content with DRM, Adobe Access and Google Widevine.

Video Cloud DRM is available only to Video Cloud Enterprise publishers; the information in this topic is not relevant for Video Cloud Express publishers.

What is DRM?

Video Cloud Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a robust content protection program that enables publishers to enforce polices and rules for usage of their content. Video Cloud DRM offers you the option of using Adobe Access or Google Widevine to protect your content against piracy and redistribution by others.

Support Highlights

  • Secured content at origin. Every video asset is packaged as an individually protected asset, each with its own unique encryption key.
  • No password required. Your content is protected from pirating and from redistribution by others, without requiring any input from viewers to watch your content.
  • Range of CDNs. In this release, Video Cloud supports DRM for publishers using Video Cloud, Akamai, and Limelight CDNs, with a case-by-case consideration for other CDNs.
  • Encrypted renditions. Video Cloud DRM delivers highly secure multiple bitrate encoding.
  • Disaster protection. The Brightcove license servers are highly available, and provide disaster recovery.
  • Protection sticks when shared. Video Cloud videos persist their DRM protected policies when shared to Twitter and Facebook from the Video Cloud player.

How does Video Cloud protect your content using DRM?

Video Cloud offers the option to protect your newly uploaded content using Video Cloud DRM as a fully integrated and seamless end-to-end solution, managed and hosted by Brightcove. Video Cloud DRM encrypts your content, sets your license policies, and delivers your content via progressive download or streaming through a secure solution that's completely transparent to your viewers, requiring no passwords or plug-in installation from them, and no maintenance from you as a publisher.

Brightcove offers two methods for protecting your content using DRM, Adobe Access and Google Widevine.

Adobe Access

Adobe Access software provides a scalable and efficient workflow to deliver and protect premium video delivered to Flash-based players across desktop devices. You can distribute content protected with Adobe Access by streaming via Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP), progressive download, or downloads to a content library for local playback at the consumer's convenience. To learn more about protecting your content using Adobe Access, see the document Protecting Your Content using Adobe Access.

Google Widevine

Google Widevine offers a multiplatform, multiformat DRM and video optimization solution that content owners, internet video providers, retailers and video operators can use to deliver a branded, high quality entertainment offering to internet-connected entertainment platforms. To learn more about protecting your content using Google Widevine, see the document Protecting Your Content using Google Widevine.

Considerations when using DRM

  1. Implementation is a wholesale operation. If you enable DRM protection, all the videos in your account will be protected. There is no way to protect only a subset of the videos in your account.
  2. If you elect to terminate Video Cloud DRM, newly uploaded videos will not be packaged with DRM protection, and a process will begin to unpack existing DRM-packaged titles one by one. For accounts that terminate DRM protection, previously packaged videos will fail to play until they become unpackaged. After DRM termination, playback will not be impacted for both newly uploaded videos without DRM protection, and for previously DRM-protected videos once they are unpackaged.
  3. Video Cloud DRM-protected videos may be shared to an account that is not DRM-enabled, however, the non-DRM account should be enabled for DRM playback. Contact Brightcove Support to have this done.
  4. HLS Encryption will follow the same behavior as DRM and Media Sharing today - sharees of DRMed accounts can playback content, so sharees of HLS Encryption-enabled accounts should be able to play back too.
  5. DRM is not supported in players embedding in Flash, using the ActionScript publishing code.
  6. DRM is not maintained on videos distributed to YouTube via Video Cloud Studio distribution.
  7. We provide anonymous support only. This feature does not include authentication-based DRM.
  8. After Video Cloud DRM has packaged and encrypted all renditions for a previously uploaded video, it updates the modified time and date for that video to the time when DRM protection was completed. The date and time when a video is last modified shows as the Last Updated date and time for that video in the Video Cloud Studio Media module, and as the MODIFIED_DATE in the Media API.
  9. This release of Video Cloud DRM does not allow for setting policies that target new sources of revenue and monetization via Pay-Per-View, rental or other DRM-specific monetization policies. DRM will not impact ad play for videos.
  10. The image capture tool in the Media module does not work for DRM-protected videos.
  11. Remote assets can't be created in accounts that have been enabled with DRM.
  12. It is possible to have multiple content protection schemes (Widevine, Access or none) within the same account. You should contact Brightcove Support to enable this functionality.

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