PallyCon is strengthening its DRM protection suite with Concurrent Stream Limiting (CSL). It identifies simultaneous streams and limits them per user account.

During content playback, DRM License Renewal enables periodic license renewal requests and responses by having the license duration shorter than the content length. This feature benefits the premium content providers by putting a check on excessive account sharing and checking on decreasing revenue. This method is different from the traditional method of limiting the number of devices registered per user account, with the latter method involving loopholes around hacking the device de-registration process when the number of registered devices exceeds. In addition, PallyCon’s CSL also circumvents the difficulty in obtaining unique ID information, especially when using web browsers, and ensures a hassle-free user experience.

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Though other service providers implement CSL by checking the content playback’s start and end times and communicating between the service application and backend server, this implementation is not robust enough. It can be bypassed by hacking the client application and there may also be a mismatch between the actual concurrent stream count and the one at the server.

Govindraj Basatwar, Managing Director – APAC, says, “As per the latest analyst research, one of the leading  OTT player and other U.S. streaming video services lose about $25 billion a year in potential revenue due to password sharing. CSL is an important feature to block revenue leakages, it will give OTT Vendors control over simultaneous playback limits viewed through the same users, deterring  credential sharing.”

For each SiteID subscribed to PallyCon services, maximum concurrent streams allowed per user account, and DRM license renewal cycle can be set.

Supports all major DRMs

The DRM license renewal supports major DRMs ranging from Widevine, PlayReady, and FairPlay. In Widevine, the CSL embeds into the license renewal specification without any additional settings or player restrictions.

Regarding support for the PlayReady DRM environment, among all the HTML5 players tested so far, Bitmovin is the only player that provides the license renewal API to manually request renewal in accordance with the license renewal cycle.

Coming to FairPlay support for Safari, the support currently is for the in-built HLS player only. For iOS apps, manual license renewal processing is implemented in our FPS iOS SDK library, making the CSL integration easy. The renewal cycle setting can be done either as original or JSON, according to the Response Format of the license token.

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