Unified Streaming selected by maxdome for MPEG-DASH streaming

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2015
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Unified Streaming selected by maxdome for streaming MPEG-DASH and CENC from PlayReady encrypted content

AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands — maxdome, Germany’s most popular online video platform, has selected Unified Streaming, a leading provider of cross-platform streaming technologies for streaming Widevine Modular encrypted MPEG-DASH to address Google Chrome users.

The requirements were straightforward: as Google announced to drop support for the NPAPI standard in Chrome, maxdome was looking for a solution to stream MPEG-DASH with Widevine Modular to satisfy customers using Google Chrome with the new maxdome HTLM5 MPEG DASH player. As Unified Streaming supports MPEG DASH since 2011 the real challenge was to create CENC encrypted MPEG DASH streams from a PlayReady encrypted catalogue without re-packaging or re-encoding. maxdome’s catalogue of more than 60,000 titles is stored pre-encrypted and re-encoding the catalogue would have led to doubling storage capacity and long time-to-market, which was unacceptable for maxdome.

Unified Streaming solved the puzzle for maxdome by deploying Unified Origin in combination with a unique feature called “PIFF2CENC”. As the name suggests it allows for streaming Common Encrypted (CENC) DASH from a PlayReady encrypted (PIFF) Microsoft Smooth catalogue. It does the conversion on the fly in a full dynamic fashion. There are various advantages like: no need for re-packaging or re-encoding, no need for extra storage and quick time-to-market.

“More and more we see content providers taking ownership of parts in the delivery chain to reduce overall cost and increase flexibility” said Simon Westbroek, VP Global Sales Unified Streaming. “We are very excited that we could help maxdome in solving the challenges around DRM-fragmentation.”