When discussing DRM tools offered by different service providers it is absolutely critical to address scalability if the customer has a large audience base. Many content owners who are planning large events with flash crowds in the 10s or 100s of thousands should be aware of issues with license delivery scalability and reliability. Needless to say no customer is delighted to sit on a page for a while only to receive a page timeout message after several minutes! The same can happen to anyone trying to acquire a license to watch your content or event.
Content encryption and decryption is a processor intensive process that certainly deals with hardware and software limitations. At iStreamPlanet we worked hard to resolve this issue and give customers the ability to scale up to a virtually unlimited number of licenses delivered over a specified period of time. Most of us are technical enough to understand that total number of licenses issued over let’s say one day or a month is fundamentally different from the ability to issue a certain amount of licenses in 1 minute or 5 minute time period. Now you might ask what is so critical about 5 minute period. Imagine you are running a live pay-per-view event at 2pm, let’s assume it’s a box match, and you have 10,000 prepaid customers. At 2pm there is a high probability that 95%+ of your prepaid customers plus new signups will attempt to login, get their licenses and start watching the event. We are talking about 9,500+ users requesting licenses in less than a few minutes!!! How critical is it to you that they all get their licenses in timely manner (in our world that’s almost instantly) and are able to watch the video? It’s reasonable to expect if they are not able to acquire their licenses, they will call tech support lines and many of them will request a refund! Ask anyone that has worked technical support lines and they will tell you how ‘pleasant’ those conversations are!
iStreamPlanet DRM Web Services are offered in several different tiers each designed to accept a certain number of concurrent requests and output a defined number of licenses per second under maximum load. Even our basic Tier 1 offering can accept 200 concurrent requests and output 60 licenses per second under constant load! More importantly we can place you in a higher tier almost instantly and accommodate your growing user base.
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Here is the latest research data from Nielsen Ratings on the growth of broadband usage in the US and growth of Internet video. It's apparent that scalability (ability to issue DRM licenses in short time) will be playing an important role as more and more content becomes available and content owners become more aware of importance of protecting their media assets.
U.S. Broadband Composition Reaches 72 Percent at Home
Nielsen//NetRatings, a global leader in Internet media and market research, announced today that nearly three-quarters of U.S. active Web users connected at home via broadband in May, growing 15 percentage points over a year ago, when just 57 percent of active Web users relied on broadband connections at home.
AOL Television was the overall fastest growing Web site at work, increasing 94 percent, from a unique audience of 835,000 to 1.6 million. MSN TV took the No. 2 spot, increasing 94 percent from 769,000 to 1.5 million unique visitors. MSN Movies rounded out the top three, growing 57 percent, from a unique audience of 1.8 million to 2.9 million.
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