Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Guest Column

Mobile TV needs to solve the security question to take off

By Cheng Wu, Chairman, Azuki Systems

Today’s consumers want to watch their favorite content when they want and on whatever device they choose – with the same experience, quality, personalization and navigation they get with their home TV sets. With the rise of smartphones, tablets, connected TVs, gaming consoles and streaming players, providing this experience needs to be on every video delivery company’s strategic agenda.

Pioneers of first-generation Over-The-Top video delivery such as Netflix and Hulu have demonstrated the success of streaming on-demand video to tens of millions of consumers. As a result, companies including content owners, cable, satellite dish and Telco/IPTV providers are all vying for a spot in the new, fast-moving market of OTT multi-screen video. By leveraging OTT services (commonly referred to as “TV Everywhere”) for their end-users, these companies can provide movies, shows and other content to multiple devices over the Internet to give subscribers access to content anywhere, anytime. From a business perspective, OTT video will give these companies the opportunity to extend existing video service revenue models and increase customer loyalty.

First generation OTT video has significant limitations, including video-on-demand (VOD) only offerings and a business model designed to compete with video service providers. Additionally, one of the challenges to making TV Everywhere a reality and a successful business venture is having the ability to deliver content to multiple screens with consistent user experiences, great TV quality and the guarantee of content protection – at home and outside the home – without impacting existing video operations.

Content protection, however, is the key to the kingdom. When delivering OTT video to consumer-owned devices — at home and for people on the go — companies must be able to provide ways to secure the content at all times.

OTT is classified as an unmanaged (i.e., unsecure) delivery network because it leverages the Internet, clouds (apps, infrastructure and storage) and Content Delivery Networks (CDN). As a result, it can only be indirectly controlled and is subject to network congestion caused by other users and applications. Also, because the public network is unmanaged and unsecure, the content becomes highly vulnerable to piracy, hacking and other common Internet threats.

Similarly, most consumer-owned devices are also unsecure by default and require new software protection techniques to be implemented to achieve consistent content protection (including digital rights management) across multiple devices. While some devices are considered secure, they may only work with a specific digital rights management back-end, or the content decryption and key storage may be limited to a particular device.

To solve this issue, companies need to unify content protection across devices in concert with adaptive streaming delivery, so that content is protected at all times — in transit, at-rest and during playback. To protect content, companies need to leverage security approaches like user authentication, device identification and offer the same level of content protection that service providers are accustomed to in the traditional home-TV environment.

Companies wanting to jump into the fast-moving and growing OTT video delivery market and make TV Everywhere a ubiquitous reality for their customers’ need to secure the content at all times, as well as ensure the delivery of consistent user-experience and guarantee the highest-quality video possible to effectively reach all mobile platforms, smart TVs, gaming consoles and streaming players to ensure uninterrupted video anytime, anywhere.

Cheng Wu is a co-founder and chairman at Azuki Systems Inc. and founder and former chairman of Acopia Networks; founder, chairman and CEO of ArrowPoint Communications; and founder of Arris Networks. All three previous companies were acquired, for a combined total of more than $6 billion.