A Comprehensive Guide to Video DRM - Secure Your Content

In this era of piracy, protecting your video content is the key. And Digital Rights Management or Video DRM plays a key role in content protection. Though it is slightly complicated technically, you must have a thorough understanding of it as video streaming entrepreneurs.

In this blog, we will cover everything you need to know about DRM so that it becomes easier for you to implement and work with video DRM as a streaming entrepreneur. So, let’s begin by defining what DRM is and what it technically means.

Going by the literal meaning, DRM stands for “Digital Rights Management”. It helps you protect any form of digital content from any form of misuse. In simpler words, it helps you protect the intellectual property rights of the digital content created and published by you so that no one can steal or reuse your content in any manner possible.

If you want to generate revenues from your videos, it is important that they reach the viewers who are willing to pay you the price needed for it. But in this era of piracy, the pirates often try to steal your content and then release it online from their end, so that they can earn from them. As a result, you often lose out on potential viewers, who get access to the content released by the pirates. Hence, it decreases your revenue considerably.

To avoid such unwanted losses, it is important to ensure that your content is safe from piracy. And video DRM, User Authentication, Geo-Blocking, and Forensic Watermarking help ensure the same.

DRM technology plays a huge role in protecting your online video content. It does not allow unauthorized devices and unauthorized users to access the content, as the DRM Key (which we will explain in our next few sections) is delivered to the authorized devices and user accounts only.

Also, most of the video DRM technologies implement screen recording protection, which makes content stealing difficult for the pirates. Hence, DRM itself offers two-way protection, by restricting the content access and encrypting it, along with preventing any form of content recording and reuse.

Fundamentally, DRM plays the following four major roles in video playback:

We usually “Encrypt” any digital content to keep it safe from unwanted access. Actually, it can be considered as a form of digital lock. During Encryption, the original content is encoded (read converted) into an alternative form of data. And that alternative data is transferred from the server to the user’s devices via the internet or any other form of network. This end-user device knows how to “Decrypt” this content.

Now in the case of DRM, this encryption is done using a special DRM key, which can be decrypted using the corresponding DRM decryption key only. This key is delivered to the authentic end-user’s device from a special DRM server just before the video playback. Hence, DRM Encryptions are always more stronger and difficult to decrypt without the right key on the right device.

Technically, in a DRM-enabled