Making Money with Streaming Media
Cut Down on Excessive Use and Theft
This one may sound intuitive but you won’t believe how many people year after year after year continue to lose money overpaying for bandwidth or losing the edge on the competition because some geek at the other guys shop got a copy of the new sales and marketing materials for next month’ show. I remember one point in 2000 when you were able to freely watch the company meeting of a well known CDN in all its glory and ugliness. What this company would have given to have kept that file out of the hands of the competition if to only save face.
Step One: Use Silent Licensing. If your customer just wants to prevent theft of their content, the silent license function in WMT DRM allows for a user to watch a piece of content for free with a silent license being passed to their player before they play the content. This typically happens in less than three seconds and for the most part is completely transparent to the user.
Step Two: Use Instant Revocation. When it comes time to expire an internal communication or presentation, your customers are able to instantly shut down access to a piece of content or whole directories of content with one click. Whether the message got leaked or it’s just plain old, your customer will have the option of controlling the message and the medium at their desktop.
File-level DRM is not the final word in defending your assets on the web however combined with a holistic overall security policy, DRM can be your most effective tool in preventing excessive bandwidth usage related to your content. If your customers streaming media bill is starting to get out of hand, file-level DRM gives your customer one more way to balance out their expenditures and cut down usage by unauthorized or unwanted parties without a high cost of implementation.
About The Author
Christopher Levy is President of NFA Group, a leading provider of World Class DRM technologies in the Entertainment and Media Markets, Levy has been a driving force in the rapid evolution of the Streaming Media industry. After founding ClickHear Productions in 1995 and later leading the sale of the company to CMGi for nearly $6 Million, Christopher invented and led to market "streamOS", the industry's first Overlay Content Management/Delivery Platform for publishing streaming media across multiple Content Delivery Networks.