2023 was a busy year indeed – BuyDRM enhanced its KeyOS Content Security Platform with new releases, feature sets, and products, and we are just getting started! From time to time, we are asked – "What is on your roadmap?" How much time do you have? Grab a cup of coffee and dig into our 2023 Year in Review.
New Products
MultiMark Forensic Server-Side Watermarking – a product that has long been in the works for us, MultiMark is now a production-ready forensic watermarking solution. Unlike most watermarking offerings where you are supplied an SDK and must build an ecosystem around it, MultiMark Server is a fully functional solution. It includes a pre-profiler that will pre-profile content to decide the ideal placement for these forensic watermarks and a dynamic packager and streaming server.
Each stream is unique in this workflow, providing the highest level of security available. As the user requests the stream, MultiMark Server will grab the pre-profiled content, insert the unique watermark, package the content with DRM, and then act as an origin server – all on the fly. We are incredibly grateful for our talented engineers who rolled out such a complex solution that is now production-ready!
MultiStream Dynamic Packager – the heart of our MultiMark watermarking offering, our MultiStream solution allows for dynamic packaging, streaming, and origining of DRM content. While our KeyOS platform has offered a basic command line packager for some time, MultiStream is the Swiss Army Knife of Just in Time encryption and on-the-fly streaming of content.
New Features
MultiBlock Concurrency Detection – concurrency detection/limiting is a DRM feature set that could have the largest impact on revenue and licensing enforcement but is mostly flying under the radar. When the world’s largest OTT operators like Netflix began to crack down on password sharing, concurrency limiting was one of the tools in their toolbox. The result was an addition of 8.8M subscribers, revenue climbed by 8%, and earnings increased by 20%. Concurrency limiting could be the most effective use of DRM for your bottom line.
BuyDRM launched MultiBlock Concurrency Detection at IBC 2023, and the feature is now production-ready for both Widevine and FairPlay heading into 2024!
Widevine Multiple Key Support – when acquiring rights to premium content, this is a feature that is becoming regularly required by studios. The idea is that specific renditions should be packaged to require different security levels. For example, 720p content might require Widevine Level 3, whereas 1080p may require Widevine Level 2, and UHD content may require Widevine Level One. In addition, audio tracks may be encrypted with different keys as well. In the past, each of these different renditions would need its own separate license response, but with support for Multiple Keys for Widevine, this can all be done with a single license.
Multiple Key support is a feature that we have showcased and supported for some time. Still, with studios becoming more stringent on the protection of their content, it has driven many top-tier brands who may have been using legacy DRM solutions towards the cutting-edge feature sets offered with BuyDRM's MultiKey DRM offering.
Widevine License Release – in yet another upgrade for supported rollouts in 2023, our MultiKey DRM platform now supports a License Release feature. A concept tailored for downloaded content, License Release adds the ability to revoke a license, even if it has not reached its expiration. In the past, the recommended strategy to achieve the same result was to issue shorter-than-anticipated expiration policies for the license so that the denial/renewal can be done over a shorter time window. With License Release, expiration dates can now be set for more extended periods since a DRM license can be revoked based on business policies around downloaded content and the rights enforcement of that content.
New Customers
While we cannot mention some of our most prominent brands, a few that we were proud to showcase in 2023 are SamsungTV+, ViaPlay, and Udemy. Be sure to head over to www.buydrm.com and download our Case Studies. There, you can learn how these companies leveraged BuyDRM to cut down on piracy while acquiring rights to content that was previously unavailable due to required features that were not available with their legacy DRM platforms.
Additions like these and others have catapulted BuyDRM's MultiKey offering to deliver more than 100M licenses per day, the equivalent of over 35 Billion licenses per year!
New Faces
Many of you know that Europe's largest hosting provider, OVH Cloud, acquired BuyDRM in 2021, but some don't understand why. The proverbial cat is out of the bag now that OVH has announced and rolled out its new Key Management Service! BuyDRM was strategically targeted for this acquisition due to our decades-long cutting-edge expertise in cryptography and the ability to manage keys securely. As part of the growing data sovereignty movement, OVH had an initiative to protect data down to the hardware level. The acquisition resulted in a bifurcation of our team, where several of our key team members went to work on delivering this KMS product for OVH.
As a result, BuyDRM started the tedious task of replacing this talent. In 2023, we added new team members to bolster our position as one of the world's premier Content Security platforms.
If you haven't already, meet our Head of Platform, Daniils Kostornijs, formerly from IBM, Daniils has had a significant impact on BuyDRM in his short time here. Putting his cloud architecture and system administration skills to work, Daniils has brought our KeyOS platform to new levels with highly efficient updates and architectures that allow us to support many of the largest DRM deployments in the world.
Say hello to Cyprien Galesne, our Business Development Manager for the European Union. Based in the Brittany Region of France, Cyprien was formerly with Enensys Technologies; Cyprien brings a unique feature set of experience in the satellite industry with delivery of ATSC3.0, DVB-T/T2, HBB TV, and working with telecoms. Cyprien is a hard worker, so if you don't say hello to him, we are sure he will say hello to you, probably sooner rather than later.
Last but certainly not least, meet Saeed Moradi, a former Senior Media Video Engineer from Apple; Saaed is leading our team of engineers on our MultiMark watermarking product, including the addition of support for Live A/B watermarking. Saeed is a refreshing example of an out-of-the-box thinker who will help advance this platform to levels previously thought of as unobtainable.
What is in Store for 2024?
Well, how much time do you have? To make a long story short – let's say we have more than a few things up our sleeves for 2024. We will feature our new rollout of supporting A/B watermarking at NAB, opening a much larger market for sports, sports betting, and other live broadcasters looking to protect their most valuable content with watermarking technologies. And we may even have news that some might consider groundbreaking, but that is for another day.
