Making Money with Streaming Media

It’s unknown what the annual revenue of the Streaming Media industry as a whole is each year but I would venture to estimate it to be about half a Billion dollars of services and goods in today’s downturn economy. When I sat down to write this piece on Digital Rights Management and how to deploy it effectively a good friend of mine said make sure and talk to your audience as a whole and realize they are all working to make money in this industry so keep it to the point.

So to that note, what is the point of Streaming Media? I used to get this question posed back to me many times in the late 90’s as I stood cornered in the IT Director’s office at Fortune 500 Company X awaiting a signature on a six figure purchase order for streaming media services to be rendered in the not-so-distant future. Before the day and age of the IPO blowup and the inevitable "dot-bombing" of the dot com industry, money was king and my partner had taught me to simply look the customer in the eye no matter what their level of understanding was of the technology and say, "To make money."

And now, more than ever, this one simple message rings true as we look to a new year with an unknown horizon ahead for the Streaming Media Industry in 2003. In the past year we have seen a lot of innovative technology and services make it to the marketplace and with continued dedication and innovation we should see continued growth in the industry with a steady two year growth putting the industry at a Billion dollar value proposition.

From time to time every industry takes a look at where it is and what it needs to do in order to secure long term stability and revenue growth. One industry which has begun this process recently is the Recording Industry which lost a rumored 2 Billion in valuation because of theft and re-transmission of their principle product which is composed of zeros and ones considering most modern music is sold in CD format.

It seems like every day there is a new article about DRM and how it is going to be the cure-all solution for a theft-plagued internet. Last month’s Wired magazine featured a whole article about Sony and Microsoft’s battle to be the DRM standard. The term DRM continues to have various different labels and features to different writers and to make it worse now there is DRM for CD’s and DRM for HD and DRM for what next who knows?

What we do know is that today, now, there are a variety of mechanisms which are available to protect your or your customer’s streaming media content from being stolen. Some of these applications require plug-ins be installed on your streaming media server and some of them require that you only deliver your streaming media using a dedicated server with one-to-one connections. This article will take a more in-depth look at the most common form of DRM which is file-level DRM.

Using file-level DRM streaming media creators and hosts have the ability to "lock once and deploy many" with a very simple and transparent architecture which allows for more seamless integrations within the enterprise. Surprisingly enough, file-level DRM applications are nearly invisible to their CDN or web hosts and require minimal integration with any front end website authentication scripts which may be in place prior to the DRM deployment.

Since this article is about making money using streaming media, let’s take a look at three simple ways to use file-level DRM technology to make money for your customer or your business. To appeal to the biggest audience possible we are going to use the DRM product from Microsoft for our examples given that the Windows Media player is the world’s most deployed streaming media technology in the enterprise.

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