CMAF and DRM at Hulu, Netflix, and Disney
Learn more about CMAF, DRM, and OTT at Streaming Media East.
See complete videos and other highlights from Streaming Media West Connect on Streaming Media's YouTube channel.
Read the complete transcript of this video:
Nick Brookins: Hulu's offering has a lot of premium content, from our own originals to premium add-ons. And so of course this comes with it: the requirement to keep all of that content safe. So we use several DRM providers to secure every bit of our content with strong protection. The specific DRM will differ depending on the best path for us on that device, which sometimes even changes over time. And this really speaks to one of those benefits of CMAF that I mentioned we've been carefully timing because there's that crossover point where enough devices support CBCS mode to really gain that efficiency in the system as you start to implement from de-duplication. CMAF was possible much earlier and could be done more easily for providers whose content doesn't require DRM or some of these other complexities. And, in some cases, we could have moved faster, but generally at the cost of significant development back on old legacy devices. We'd rather focus that effort on forward-looking capabilities instead.
Cyril Concolato: People might know that CMAF relies on another specification for the DRM part. It relies on something called common encryption. And coming encryption, from day one, has had support for a multi-DRM system. So at Netflix we use that heavily. We deploy all the major DRM systems--Fairplay, Widevine PlayReady. And CMAF is really ready for that. There was no hurdle in the adoption of DRM systems in CMAF. I would say the biggest hurdle in this case--and something we probably need to clarify in the specification and in the industry--is the NDNS of the key IDs. It's really, really a pain. But apart from that, we deploy all DRM systems and to all devices, as you mentioned.
Bill Zurat: One of the things that we had to do from a live perspective was make sure that we could collapse all the DRM that we could for that encryption mode into one playlist. So you can imagine that we wouldn't have all these playlists around for all the different DRMs. So we had to make sure that we could unify that. That took many, many years. And I know a lot of people on this call understand the slog that that was.
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