Google’s contradictions are killing CMAF and screwing everyone , including its own users

Or why you won’t get 4K quality on Netflix content using Chrome anytime soon. I’ve tracked CMAF development before [1], and how the whole industry went through so much effort into creating a common format which would be compatible with every single device out there. Yes, manifests would be different between HLS and DASH, but the underlying streamed content would be shared between all devices. In order for people to understand how we got that far, we need to understand that it took Microsoft’s willingness to allow applications and devices using Playready 3 or below to become incompatible with content encrypted using Playready …

DRM 101 – Introduction to DRM systems

It may seem silly, but it’s so difficult to find proper information about a DRM is, what it isn’t, and broadly, how it works. What is not a DRM Most people associate a DRM with content protection, a way to protect the content. However, stricto sensu, it isn’t. A DRM system is not about how contents are protected or encrypted. In fact, most current DRMs use exactly the same encryption methods to protect content, and again contrary to most DRM way of thinking, these methods are public and vary between AES-CTR and AES-CBC. If you find those names too familiar, it’s …

Playready 4 will bring closure to the DASH dream: one single OTT format to rule them all

Editor’s note: the initial version mistakenly identified AES-CTR as “AES-CTB”, which doesn’t really exist. What got us here? 2017 was a weird year. It’s not often that the OTT video industry comes together to create simplify the industry player’s lives. It was tried before and failed. Then DASH appeared, it promised to rule on the OTT format wars, by proposing a single standard format, but at the end of the day, it failed to deliver its promise. DASH is a single standard, but as any other bad standard, it allows for options, incompatible options. It’s these options which allows standard compliant …

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