A few weeks ago I started to manage the new VOD platform. It's local, working only in my country, so its name is not relevant here. Project was started by a movie distribution company, seeking diversification and alternative to their DVD sales business, without the technical competence. They hired programming company, deeply Microsoft-related (partnership and so on). As you can expect, the platform was based on
.NET/Windows Server, using IIS Smooth Streaming with PlayReady DRM, and Silverlight player. Then the problems with interoperability have started, as CEO quickly discovered, this solution has not worked on his iPad or iPhone, nor the Mac OS X playback was free from errors (most people in the company are appleheads, after all its movie business).
I come to the company as the manager with technological expertise (working a few years as the hosting guy/web developer, mostly in open source technologies), to oversee the work done by these external programmers. Our business strategy was to rely on presence on many different platforms, but now we're locked in. Luckily we were able to come on Samsung SmartTV platform, but only due to PlayReady implementation on these devices. We find a developers to prepare for us iOS app (Apple devices are PlayReady certified) and Sony PS3 app (also PlayReady certified). The advisors declared that there is no chance in moving our platform to Android and Linux, because THERE ARE NO DRM SYSTEMS AVAILABLE for these platforms.
The problem is that we have partners building their own settop boxes with Android on board, who want to use our VOD service as the source of premium video content for their users. The Android app would be great, but we cannot stream movies from our catalogue without DRM protection. I know that DRM sux, and is easy to circumvent, but you know, its a requirement put there by major movie producers - we cannot ignore that.
With these restrictions, we're looking for technological solution to bring our VOD content to the Android, and if it could be possible, to desktop Linux (at least Ubuntu). I've found Google DRM system:
http://www.widevine.com/drm.html. Does anyone here has expertise in working with it? Can we use IIS to stream content encoded with this Widewine DRM? Please give your advice, maybe the Flash-based solution would be better, at least AdobeAIR still works on Android?