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Viodi View Newsletter – January 5th 2004 Issue
Indie Telco Local Content Workshop Advertisement
Time for Persistent Encryption?
By Ken Pyle, [email protected], Viodi, LLC
As stated in previously in the Viodi View, security is to this decade as quality was to the 80s. This evidenced by the four or five webinars that NTCA hosted in 2004. The latest webinar Persistent Encryption and the Implication for Operators featured Andy Mathieson of Latens Systems, and Rob Lingle, Vice President of Engineering for TVN. TVN is a long-time aggregator and distributor of VOD and PPV content, so they have experienced the challenges of providing adequate content protection to assuage the concerns of content owners.
Lingle summed up the importance of content protection when he stated that, “Pre-encryption protects you from liability from leakage”. He emphasized that studios will not license content without a protection system. It is clearly the operator’s responsibility. He pointed out that content protection does cost. But, properly planned, the content protection can also be used for more than just video.
Lingle pointed out that, “encryption systems tend to be islands among themselves.” This presents real inefficiencies for TVN and the industry in general, as content has to be encrypted and decrypted and re-encrypted multiple times. To date, content has mostly been stored “in the clear” on servers. Lingle suggested that the studios increasingly want content to remain encrypted throughout the delivery chain; hence the term persistent encryption.
TVN is taking the position that they need to support multiple encryption systems to meet the needs of their various affiliates and content licensors. To reduce the number of times they must transmit encrypted content, TVN would like to see all encryption vendors using a common encryption algorithm. In this scenario, each vendor would have specific keys that would be unique to their system.
The content would stay encrypted throughout the entire chain from TVN’s uplink facility through to the set-top and, potentially, to other devices in the networked home.
What he is saying makes a lot of sense, as it would allow for easier interoperability, more competition between encryption vendors and more efficient operations for all. There are many challenges in getting to the scenario outlined by Lingle, including the fact that some older VOD servers cannot make trick files (for fast-forward, pause, etc.) with encrypted content. Another challenge is dealing with inserting advertising into encrypted streams.
The biggest challenge to such an idea will be to get the various stakeholders, such as suppliers, content owners and operators, to agree upon standards. It was suggested that the DVB and its AES algorithm could be a model for what is needed. Viodi will be tracking this and other standards based initiatives throughout 2005.
Lindle also reinforced the importance a content protection plan in order to obtain content. He stressed that each particular implementation requires the studio to look at the operator’s implementation, even if they are using TVN. Lindle offered another bit of sage advice when he suggested that an operator has an exit strategy before deploying. As he was pointed out, the advantage of standards is it does provide an exit strategy. Otherwise, it is possible to get stuck in a proprietary solution with no easy exit.
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