Video Breakthroughs

ACCESS and Verimatrix announced at TV Connect that they have jointly produced a new product, Verimatrix Gateway to address security concerns around the adoption of multiscreen media sharing. The new product combines NetFront Living Connect, the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) component from ACCESS, with the ViewRight Gateway security solution by Verimatrix to provide an integrated security and in-home media sharing solution.

The at-show demo sees ViewRight Gateway enable translation between incoming content streams from a managed distribution network, or stored recordings, and corresponding stream formats that are optimized for in-home distribution using NetFront Living Connect. The demonstrated and trusted secure formats are DTCP-IP and enhanced security HLS.

The DLNA’s support for streaming of premium content within the home, announced at IBC and initially for Europe only, is a major milestone in the evolution of connected home services. The move might have come sooner, but DLNA was waiting for maturation of the key underlying technology, DTCP-IP (Digital Transmission Content Protection over IP) to ensure safe and yet transparent delivery of content over IP networks. DTCP itself evolved in the mid 1990s, developed by chip maker Intel in conjunction with four major CE (consumer electronics) companies, Hitachi, Panasonic, Sony and Toshiba.

Apart from satisfying content owners, there is another important reason for DLNA’s adoption of DTCP-IP for copy protection around the home, which is to enable consumers to exercise their digital rights to the full. To do this, DTCP-IP enables operators to enforce multi-level rights dependent on the content.

DTCP-IP allows consumers to copy and record content subject to permission from the operator or rights holder. The rights are specified in a licence issued by the Digital Transmission Licensing Administrator (DTLA), details of which can be obtained from its website. The idea is that the licence encodes rules into the content, so that, for example, free-to-air terrestrial broadcasts could be recorded and copied without any restriction. In the case of subscription channels, consumers may be allowed to record content for their own subsequent viewing, but not copy it for sending to friends. Then premium content such as movies or live sports purchased on demand or pay-per-view via a specific transaction would probably be fully protected against recording and copying.

I’ve been meaning to explain this acronym for a while, and a recent announcement from the DLNA (who create some of the standards that are supposed to make home streaming simpler) is probably as good a reason as any.

Regular readers will recall that I’ve seen various recorders over recent months that have fairly advanced functionality, allowing you to record programmes on the hard disk and then watch it over the home network, and predicted we’ll see more of them.

For example, last year’s Panasonic FreeviewHD recorder could do the trick, and it’s due to come to the Humax FreeviewHD boxes too. But, right now, it’s a little limited, because of content control issues – that’s the rules that say, for instance, that some material broadcast on FreeviewHD can only be copied to disc once.