Media isn’t free. Even if you give it away, there are real costs for producing the content and making it available online. It’s your right to get paid, either directly with cash, or indirectly by driving marketing initiatives like increased traffic, data collection, or advertising exposure.

(The most direct way to get paid is a turn-key online video store. Check out the video store walkthrough!)

Unfortunately, betting on digital media to drive profits is usually a gamble. Tools to rip off your content are on every shareware site. Passwords are exchanged in all the newsgroups and IRC channels. Let someone download a piece of unprotected content and tomorrow it’s on Kazaa. Bad news is everyone’s getting a piece of the action except you. Good news is this is easy to fix.

Digital Rights Management for streaming media has come of age. Apple has sold millions of songs through iTunes. Microsoft’s DRM is built into home and portable media hardware. And we’ve delivered hundreds of millions of DRM licenses to broadband consumers around the globe.

Video Free-for-All

There are a couple dirty little secrets about streaming that you might not know. First, if you “stream” videos from a web server, it’s not really streaming. Anyone can grab them. Second, if you serve them from a media server and don’t DRM protect them, determined users can still grab them.

Ever been to http://www.wmrecorder.com/ and looked at their software? The home page says WM Recorder “allows for one-click recording of any Windows Media streaming video or audio content.” And it’s “perfect for … subscription content” too.

Worried yet?

Check out their Quick Start Guide to see how easy it is for anyone who can see your streams to steal your streams, even if the streams are password protected. Now have a look at the FAQ, where you’ll find one note that makes all the difference. “Digital Rights Management (DRM) … cannot be recorded.”

If you want to make money from video, you owe it to yourself to safeguard your profitability.

Painless Profits

Under the hood, DRM definitely isn’t simple. Even with the largest R&D budget around, it’s taken Microsoft three versions to get it right. But third time’s a charm, and Microsoft’s Janus “Plays Anywhere” DRM is powerful, flexible, and robust, while guaranteeing your content plays by your rules.

We are a Microsoft authorized DRM developer and DRM provider, working with customers like you since 2003 to make sure the business rules you need perform flawlessly at high volume and low costs. We’ve also worked to make DRM as simple to use as unprotected content.

Here’s how you upload regular content to our network for streaming:

1. FTP a streaming video into the desired folder
2. Link to the video from your site
3. Let viewers play the stream

And here’s how you create DRM protected content for streaming:

1. FTP a streaming video into the desired folder
2. Link to the video from your site
3. Let viewers play the stream

Behind the scenes, between steps 1 and 2, we encrypt the video, add it to a database of digital rights managed content, and update the inventory of business rules and media. During step 3 we track the downloads or streams, enforce your business rules controlling playback of the content, and record all kinds of data for tracking usage.

All you have to worry about is uploading your content. If you can use a Windows XP or Mac OS X folder, you can use our DRM. Don’t have a fast connection? We’ll FedEx you a terabyte hard drive to put the content on.

Rapid Integration

If you’re managing your own membership with your own software, we’ll send you an easy API for talking to our DRM licensing servers. It’s web services based, so you can use our API from your Perl, PHP, Java, or ASP.NET web site.

Not a programmer? No problem. If we manage your membership for you, DRM is an easy add on. This especially makes sense when you combine that with our unparalleled credit card processing and billing services.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably interested in learning more about how it all works and how we can do it for you. Just email us about your business model, and request a link to some customers’ DRM-enabled sites which give working examples of protected content for monthly members, pay-per-view, or even buy-to-own.

Pricing

Our DRM licensing pricing depends on your business models and the video delivery pricing you select. Depending on the plan, there may be one time expenses for encrypting the content or recurring expenses for digital rights managed storage. Please see our video hosting pricing or give us a call to choose the pricing that makes the most sense for you.

There’s no better way to bring your operating costs down and your profit margins up.