Widevine® Connects Cable, Telco and Satellite Services to Apple, Adobe and RealNetworks Players

Monday, June 16th, 2008
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Flexibly enables traditional linear broadcast and VOD to be securely played on PCs

SEATTLE — Widevine Technologies, the only provider of multiformat and multiplatform DRM and digital copy protection solutions, today announced an enhancement to Widevine Cypher® that enables traditional television services to be securely delivered direct to major PC players. The enhancement converts MPEG2 TS (transport streams) on a PC so they are recognizable by Adobe (Nasdaq: ADBE) Flash, Apple (Nasdaq: APPL) QuickTime and RealNetworks (Nasdaq: RNWK) RealPlayer. For the first time, video operators can securely deliver SD and HD pay-TV content to a PC without the need for special connectors, head-end equipment or custom PC player software.

Widevine Cypher makes it affordable for a video operator to utilize common web technologies to customize a browser-based user TV experience, precluding the need for expensive middleware or services layers. The solution enables subscribers to more flexibly consume existing linear broadcast (multicast) or VOD (unicast) services on Windows, Linux and Mac-based computers or mobile devices. The Widevine solution secures native PC players thereby eliminating large custom player downloads and failures due to player incompatibilities.

“Initial attempts to expand in-home networks to PCs were limited by legacy conditional access systems and a lack of support for device native media players,” said Glenn Morten, CTO at Widevine. “The media transport proxy bundled with Widevine Cypher enables operators to gain significant reach in terms of device footprint using popular players running on most PC and mobile platforms in the world today.”

The Cypher PC client watermarks content as it decrypts, then monitors and responds to the hundreds of software and hardware tools that are used to pirate and illegally distribute premium content. This studio used and recommended solution currently enables operators to extend their content licensing for PC delivery immediately.

“As the convergence of content into and out of the living room evolves, operators must be mindful of the need to extend existing infrastructure investments with solutions that can affordably bridge delivery to other devices and players already in place,” said ABI Research Industry Analyst, Zippy Aima. “Widevine’s multiplatform and multiformat content protection solution provides the protection across STB, PVR, PCs and portable media players. They have expanded their content protection and watermarking to include media transport capabilities that extend traditional services into to the PC user experience.”

To find out more about Widevine and to see a product demonstration, visit Widevine at the NXTComm show in Las Vegas, June 17-19, booth # SL10109.