The Insignificant Partnership of LLNW and Widevine for DRM

Implications: Limelight is doing the right thing by trying to include more advanced software features in its CDN offering, but the question is how many content owners are making DRM a key part of their short and long-term strategies? Focusing on streaming (via Flash Media Server and WMS) and dying technologies such as DRM probably isn't the most efficient strategy.

Analysis: There are plenty of press releases in the CDN industry regarding partnerships and product offerings. When I read the LLNW/Widevine release it struck me as a bit odd that it focused on DRM as the key component of content security and monetization. While the article also noted that customers could now "monetize virtually every piece of content in their libraries," the question is at what cost?

Delivering content is not cheap. Even using a low-cost architecture, value CDN's, and open-source software, bills for medium to large content providers can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. This doesn't even include using streaming options (real streaming - not HTTP video) such as LLNW, AKAM, and some other CDN's offer. If you want to have your content served by Flash Media Server instead of HTTP progressive download, get ready to pay even more of a premium for every Megabit per second (Mbps) that is served. Choose a new Widevine/LLNW solution on top of that, and you've probably added about 40% to your cost for every Mbps that you serve (note that this is an estimation as I do not know what LLNW is actually charging for this service).

There are 2 reasons that I would not choose a solution like this if I were a content provider:

1) Bottom Line Costs - Considering how difficult it already is for video providers to make margins through advertising, paying for the "Switzerland of DRM" would never be cost-effective enough to offset what-ever leaching or content "scraping" would occur.

2) In-Video Advertising! My view is that creative, in-video advertising will be THE key in the next couple of years to successfully monetizing content. As long as your advertising travels with the video - who cares who serves it or steals it? In fact, all the better if they do. No one particularly wants to come to your portal or your website - they just want to watch the video.

Note that I'm far from an advertising or content monetization expert, but I do see what challenges that our customers face with delivery costs. Being able to provide them free solutions for authentication and protection (without paying Adobe, Microsoft, or even Widevine), which work well, is a more efficient approach than holding on to a dying technology in DRM and forcing them to spend an often unnecessary few bucks per Mbps for "video security."