In the post-Covid period, people are watching a lot more
content on OTT platforms than they did earlier. Major Hollywood studios are
creating content exclusively for the consumption of OTT viewers. According to a
report by Digital TV Research, the OTT revenue
in North America stood at USD 49 billion in 2020, which is likely to touch USD
94 billion by 2026.[1]
However, the massive jump in viewership and revenue also poses the threat of
revenue leakage in the form of piracy, poor subscription management, password
sharing, inability to optimize on device fragmentation, and exploitation of
premium features by unauthorized users.
Most OTT apps employ digital rights management (DRM)
technology – for example, Google’s Widevine – to control piracy. While it is a well-established
practise in the video-streaming industry to manage video assets using a
multi-DRM SaaS, it needs to be stressed that DRM-protected content has more benefits than merely controlling piracy through
file encryption. The DRM technology helps OTT platforms control fine-grained
aspects of user management per video asset as against only channel-level DRM
schemes available in the ear of IPTV. Now, a video stream can take the form of
live broadcasts, downloadable files, or video on demand.
An OTT platform can further offer subscription variants in
different geographical variants or according to genres. OTT platforms are also
conscious of processor-level security offered by DRM technology companies,
especially Google, whose Widevine DRM technology lets the app play UHD files through
adequate control against piracy. It allows OTT platforms to maximize revenue
streams by offering their most lucrative plans on Android-based mobile devices
and smart TVs.
In recent years, OTT platforms have started offering
pay-per-view options to viewers. This feature becomes popular before
international sporting or entertainment-related events, like Oscar or Grammy
awards, soccer world cup, etc., in which users prefer to sign up only for the
event on the OTT platform that has obtained its broadcasting rights. Through
its multi-device user management, the DRM technology can restrict the access of
users to video streams only for that particular event.
The success of OTT platforms has greatly reduced the
earlier practise among users of buying digital copies of films, documentaries,
TV shows, etc. However, there still is a sizable
chunk of users who prefer to download and own their copies of digital videos.
Traditional sellers continue to allow downloads of videos after users have paid
for them. Similarly, OTT platforms also allow offline downloads of videos which
a user can access on a particular device as long as their subscription stays
valid. The DRM technology can be customized to protect all of these video
downloads to legitimate users by authenticating encryption keys through the DRM
server.
