With its leading Widevine brand, Google has become a world leader in digital rights management (DRM) technology. Its global user base of Android devices, smart TVs, and Chrome and Firefox web browsers is the key to its expansion. In fact, Google apps and devices outnumber their closest competitors by a large margin in each of these categories, which is even larger in certain populous geographies in the world. Widevine has become even more relevant as over-the-top (OTT) video content has grown in popularity, as major content creators cannot afford to succumb to the sophisticated pirate attacks.
However, due to device fragmentation in the consumer market, OTT apps must realize the importance of a multi-DRM SaaS vendor. It allows them to encrypt content on their platforms with multi-DRM technologies, which usually include Microsoft’s PlayReady and Apple’s FairPlay apart from Google’s Widevine.
To safeguard premium video content and live sports streams, the Google Widevine DRM system employs the dual software- and hardware-based approach. It divides the security suite into three tiers for this purpose: L1, L2, and L3. L1 and L2 levels are hardware centric, whereas the third level is directed at content consumption in web browsers and is software based. The first two levels have become operational with active synergies with popular chip makers, like Intel, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Realtek among others. Since L1 and L2 type security operates through device processors, this partnership is essential to stop piracy. L1 and L2 use the processor’s trusted execution environment for video decryption and processing.
Due to the robustness of these levels of security, as compared to L3, Hollywood studios insist on hardware-based security to play their video content in HD and UHD formats. Wherever software-based security is applied, studios tend to send a video signal in lower resolution.
Studios also mandate the use of video watermarking technology in video streams on OTT platforms for the second level of security. In the event of a successful piracy attack, forensic watermarks, and not DRM technology, helps content owners reach the user from whose device or account the video leaks.
Through the use of forensic watermarking technology, a multi-DRM vendor embeds data about the user, session, time and date, and other metadata in each frame of the video. A robust watermark stands piracy attacks of encoding and re-encoding, thus helping the content owner reach the right culprit to initiate legal action.