Digital rights management and its evolution in the context of IPTV platforms in the web domain

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel mechanism for content protection in cloud-based IPTV. The architecture presented here integrates Digital Rights Management into the web-based landscape, where the IPTV user interface is being remotely hosted or executed. The platforms for the user interface (UI) execution studied here are browser-based execution approaches, where the execution environment is provided by the browser. The browser resides on the client-side in the context of browser-based UI execution, whereas in a fully cloud-based execution the browser is shifted into the cloud. The client-side implementation for these platforms is done on the same Set-Top Box hardware to demonstrate the response time difference for both approaches. The response time considered in this paper refers to the UI execution and video encryption for unicast and multicast. This paper also introduces a breakdown of response time by introducing a method for load time measurements in the context of remote IPTV middleware. Moreover the paper presents the evolution of Digital Rights Management systems from currently existing proprietary approaches to web-based Encrypted Media Extensions in the IPTV domain, its impact on the browser- and cloud-based execution of the IPTV user interface, challenges and open issues.