Hi, my name is Kevin Collins. I'm the VP of Engineering atNavio Systems and today I'm going to talk about rights based DRM. DRM is atechnology that is used heavily in the industry today to protect content thatis going into the consumer's hands. Publishers use DRM technology to protect thatcontent and have secure distribution over to the consumers.
Consumers unknowingly have to rely on this technology anduse it within the software that they're using. If they go to Apple and iTunes,they're actually downloading DRM content. The publisher needs to deal with allof these technologies and it's very difficult to control because there's manydifferent video formats, music formats and mobile content that they have todeal with. So if you've got music and it's on the Apple iTunes store, they haveto worry about Fair Play Technology. If they're distributing video usingMicrosoft Technology they have to worry about that. And anything with mobile,they have to worry about OMA.
Now, the problem from a publisher's perspective is thatthey're now making business decisions on the technologies that are used toencode and protect this content. It's also very difficult to track and control.
A consumer doesn't fair any better. The consumer must dealwith this technology as well. And the consumer has to deal with it not onlyfrom the content perspective but they also have to deal with it because they'redealing with different devices. Consumers have iPods for music and videocontent. They will have laptops. They will have phones and Sony Playstationsand every one of those pieces of content will have different software andcodecs. It's a very complex world for the publisher and a very complex worldfor the consumer to deal with.
Rights based DRM is a service approach that takes thiscomplexity away. It makes it much simpler for the publisher and the consumer todeal directly with each other. It is a service approach that abstracts thecomplexity of the technology that's used for music, video, ringtone and othermobile content distribution away from both parties. So the service now dealswith the underlying technology and the publisher deals with the consumer onequal terms.
Now, what the publisher is going to do to make this lifeeasy for the consumer is they're going to sell content to the consumer. Andinstead of just selling the encoded file content, they're going to sell theconsumer rights to the content. And those rights are simple representations ofthe legal right that the consumer has to the content and the consumer thendeals directly with the service in order to get the content. When they get thatcontent it then comes down in the format suitable for their device. And theydon't have to worry about the choices. They simply go to the service, say I'vegot the rights to the content and they get it on the device that they want.
So with the service approach to rights based DRM, theconsumer doesn't need to deal with this. The publisher also doesn't need todeal with this. All of these are handled by the service. It's an abstractionlayer. The publisher has their content here, the service deals with all thecomplexity and the underlying technology, and all of this goes away.
