Just this month, Verimatrix hit another major milestone that reflects as much on the entire digital video industry, as it does on the company. We celebrated reaching 500+ pay-TV operator customers and securing more than 20 million screens. Our cable and satellite (DVB) customer base increased 100% in 2011, and we’ve had a 500% growth in secure OTT video services. Based on feedback from customers, particularly our DVB customers, they feel more confident that our VCAS solutions will help them extend into multi-network, multi-screen video services more efficiently.

The objective of this paper as an effort to gather actual security requirements from major content owners and describe them in a single document. The intent is to help pay-TV operators and other video service providers that are looking to launch multi-screen video services, so that they know what to expect and avoid any unpleasant surprises with regard to security requirements when licensing content to offer through their services.

To help navigate this landscape, we developed a paper that will serve as a content licensing and security guide for video service providers planning multi-network, multi-screen services. We teamed with Bill Rosenblatt, founder of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies, who has been steeped in digital rights and content management technologies for many years and has served as technical expert in litigation and public policy initiatives related to digital copyright.

Our CEO and Chief Visionary, Tom Munro, was shortlisted for a Euro50 Award in the Technology Leader category for his contributions to the pay-TV industry as a whole. Although Tom didn’t walk away with the trophy, he was recognized alongside other industry visionaries at the Awards gala in London, where we were delighted to host a great mix of partners and customers at our table. As part of its Awards coverage, Digital TV Europe asked Tom to reflect on his accomplishments in 2011, and provide his vision for 2012.

It was a pleasure to host our EMEA Autumn Summit this year near our new Munich office during Oktoberfest. Our customers and ecosystem partners attended the 2-day workshop to network with our combined European-based team and senior executives, as well as gain a full understanding of the direction of our VCAS security architecture. We laid [...]

At least one of the less obvious challenges related to delivering rich combinations of TV services to all these connected TVs and portable platforms is reproducing many aspects of the live TV experience in a scalable fashion. None of the critical adaptive bitrate streaming protocols out there, specifically Smooth Streaming and HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), have been defined in a way that makes it easy to support tens of thousands of concurrent subscribers watching a major live event such as the soccer World Cup in real time. When compared to the well-honed DVB broadcast technologies, some of the key issues of practical concern, like managing semi-synchronized key changes and addressing revenue leakage through re-broadcasting of various kinds, are not yet developed to scale in a streaming environment. Addressing these kinds of issues takes Internet TV to the commercial level necessary to truly reproduce the pay-TV service paradigm–and associated revenue models – that we are all familiar with.

Steve Christian, VP Marketing at Verimatrix provides the DRM / Conditional Access perspective of OTT TV as part of an IBC 2011 special blog series. Verimatrix is the leader in software-based security solutions for service providers.

The early release window for premium VOD movies, which offers Hollywood content for home consumption while it is still showing at theaters, has been debated for many years. One technically interesting point for me is that operators often prefer server-side integration of watermarking. The tradeoff is whether the integration is done in the client device, or in the video server before delivery.

And who already has access to high-quality content and conditional access (CA) / digital rights management (DRM) systems in place? Digital TV operators. We believe the cable, satellite and IPTV operators that already have the rights to broadcast premium content are in the cat bird seat to offer the best live mobile TV experience.

Detailed pay-TV subscriber behavior and usage data can be instrumental in enabling more focused and engaging content across multiple platforms. Verimatrix is inherently well-positioned to drive the gathering and tracking of customer viewing information to help our operator customers achieve their larger business goals.