Silverlight and Digital Rights Management (DRM)

I have received several mails on integration of DRM with Silverlight. For those who missed it we announced our Silverlight PlayReady DRM support at NAB earlier this month (I blogged about these announces earlier) as well as support for WideVine. These are by account two separate announcements and we are not using Widevine as our PlayReady DRM, but allowing partners to either use the Microsoft PlayReady DRM system or have partners like WideVine integrate directly with Silverlight.

Silverlight will provide support for our existing WMDRM10 and PlayReady all from a PlayReady Server. This means Silverlight with PlayReady will be backwards compatible to our existing DRM system, while allowing partners to migrate to PlayReady. Our existing WMDRM system has evolved over the past 10+ years and is used by all of the top content companies delivering long and short form content via the Internet.

Microsoft has not only invested heavily in the core DRM technology to provide a robust system, but we have also invested heavily in things like breach management. Why is this important? DRM systems are not foolproof, and while designed to make it extremely difficult for those in the know to compromise the system, those compromises can happen and if they do you need a system that is resilient and can be updated securely and easily. So if or when this happens, our partners and customers understand that we have the right response teams and the ability to fix and update the system efficiently. Breach management is critical to any DRM system and we have over the years built up a confidence and response level that is above and beyond any other system on the market.

PlayReady is the evolution of our DRM system and it provides features above and beyond our previous system. For more info you can read more about PlayReady here or download the white paper..

The benefit of Silverlight with PlayReady is that it will provide a cross-platform version of DRM and will provide support for streaming or progressive download. Silverlight with PlayReady pricing is different that the traditional PlayReady pricing.

Server pricing (this is Silverlight w/ PlayReady)
• One-time flat fee of $30K per CPU
• Includes breach management and operational support costs
• No variable cost per-user or per-license fees
• 120 day FREE non-commercial evaluation license (available in Oct.)

Client pricing
• FREE for Windows/Mac based PC clients
• Device client licensing/pricing info available here.

Hope this helps and clarifies the DRM integration in Silverlight.

C