A View From the Top: BuyDRM
It seems like just yesterday Microsoft was emailing me about the “Microsoft Digital Media Broadcast Manager” and how it was going to “change streaming forever.” In fact, in 2000, the notion of using software to protect access to streaming video was a noble and rare one. Having just recently launched video capability for streaming a few years prior, our entire industry was now under attack from the widespread theft on P2P networks and the Internet at large. Not long after this email, Microsoft made a pivot into “Windows Media DRM” and some nifty new codecs, players, encoders and servers, the “Windows Media Ecosystem.”
For nearly 8 years we ran with this technology, deploying it in ways that it definitely wasn’t designed for, but we performed miracles. We deployed “Dr. M” for the record labels launching the first ever online shared watch party where a new colab remix of “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” by Jay-Z and Linkin Park was deployed as a Windows Media Audio (WMA) file with a counter in the license acquisition window. When the file was shared 1M times, the license key was delivered and the track released. The New York times later covered this launch hailing it one of the brightest innovations of the year.
For some people, DRM was an opportunity to make millions by injecting toolbar installs onto people’s computers via the dreaded Windows Media Player license acquisition window before the FCC found out and shut down the entire operation. In June 2008, Microsoft released their updated PlayReady Schema, which quickly moved DRM into the mainstream. Then in 2010 Google bought Widevine and started licensing the technology to service providers. In 2018, Apple released the FairPlay Streaming SDK to service providers wanting to support the Apple ecosystem.
Through all of these releases, companies like BuyDRM continued to hone their approaches and sharpen their deployments. DRM quickly became complex, mandatory, and ubiquitous.
Today we live in a DRM-driven streaming video landscape. DRM is the sole studio-mandated streaming security technology in use across every major streaming video and audio platform in existence. While part of a broad-spectrum approach to security, DRM is the one technology standing between your content and your enemies. Thankfully, our industry has evolved DRM into a thin, scalable, nearly silent component of the streaming ecosystem with broad support on the industry’s leading encoders, servers, and playback platforms.
Recently we saw Google and Microsoft collaborating on supporting secure video playback on Windows in the Chrome browser. Apple just released FairPlay Streaming SDK v26 to the market. Google has also released numerous updates to the Widevine platform and is assisting partners in migrating from the Google Widevine proxy to DRM vendors like BuyDRM.
The good news is that Apple, Google, and Microsoft continue to invest in DRM technologies to ensure that valuable audio and video content can traverse across their platforms seamlessly and securely. As a result, companies like BuyDRM are able to offer that transactional security experience to scale that major media operators mandate.
As part of our shift in 2024 to focus primarily on the market-leading brands of their respective industries, we have found a new solution that scales DRM with the highest levels of security and TCO available in the industry.
BuyDRM’s MultiKey Managed Service Offering (MSO) combines the best of all worlds, taking an on-prem approach to DRM in the cloud. Using the MultiKey MSO, BuyDRM is able to deploy an infinitely scalable DRM node in our client’s cloud. This approach enables our clients to incorporate their DRM hosting costs into their overall hosting strategy while ensuring they have a DRM to scale solution in place with unlimited DRM licensing capacity.
We expect AVOD, FAST, downloadable music, and live sports to drive DRM usage through the atmosphere in 2025 and beyond.
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With nearly a half-century of streaming industry observations, experience, and expertise between them BuyDRM CEO Christopher Levy and Help Me Stream Research Foundation Founder Timothy Fore-Siglin gathered at Streaming Media Connect 2025 for a richly detailed, insightful, and wide-ranging interview on the state of content protection technology and strategy. The discussion covered various aspects of digital rights management (DRM) and its role in combating streaming piracy.
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