DRM Digital Rights Management

[kenco]

DRM and CA to grow to US$4.7 billion by 2010, says research firm
Press release; Eric Mah, DigiTimes.com [Wednesday 19 April 2006]


Digital rights management (DRM) and conditional access (CA) together represents a worldwide market that will expand to US$4.7 billion by 2010, up from US$1.5 billion in 2005, according to research firm iSuppli.

iSuppli defines CA as a system that controls consumer access to content on a service-provider network. CA protects the pipe and prevents theft of service but it does not determine what happens to content once delivered to users, according to iSuppli.

In contrast, DRM is focused on protecting the content itself. DRM features a more complex set of rights than CA does, and defines permissible uses, stated the research firm.

As DRM and CA come together, the term DRM increasingly is used to describe the superset of content protection, which includes CA, content protection and content rights.

The market for DRM/CA comprises a complex mix of Intellectual Property (IP) royalties, client software and server/subscriber software, according to Mark Kirstein, vice president, multimedia content and services for iSuppli.

Traditional CA technologies deployed on cable and satellite television networks and their associated set-top boxes (STBs) represent the bulk of the DRM/CA market, with revenue of under US$1 billion in 2005. This market will more than double, exceeding US$2 billion by 2010, with growth across all segments. Meanwhile, DRM technologies will supplement STB conditional access implementations, expanding to more than US$600 million by 2010.

While these technologies will generate major revenue on their own, the real impact of DRM/CA will be their revolutionary effect on the digital entertainment business.

“Not only do DRM/CA represent the primary content protection mechanism, but based on the rights rules, they define the viable business models,” Kirstein said. “As a convergence point, there are many competitive interests at stake in the DRM world, both among industries and among companies.”

Industries and companies interested in DRM/CA technology include content providers, such as studios, networks and advertisers; the platform community, including equipment manufacturers and retailers; and service providers, such as telecom/wireless and cable/satellite/terrestrial carriers.

“DRM is a crucial technology on a number of fronts,” Kirstein said. “Its role as the arbitrator of business models and revenue flow positions proprietary DRM systems in line with cash flow for service providers and content owners. Furthermore, DRM lends itself to integration in service offerings, media players and content/transaction management software. Thus, proprietary DRMs have the potential for backward integration into other software applications and have a direct impact on service-provider and content-owner revenue streams.”

A variety of companies are offering both standardized and proprietary DRM and CA solutions to both address and enable the emerging opportunity. However, a lack of interoperability between various DRM/CA technologies and battles over royalty rates are hampering not only the utility of DRM/CA, but also the development of the underlying digital content markets, Kirstein warned


http://www.digitimes.com/systems/a20060419PR203.html