bitmovin Releases Widevine & PlayReady DRM Support Using MPEG-CENC Within HTML5 for Its bitdash MPEG-DASH Player

Santa Cruz, CA, December 11, 2014 --(PR.com)-- Currently, major changes happened in the DRM market caused by the drop of NPAPI plug-ins such as Silverlight – as thus also the drop of the leading DRM system PlayReady – from Google’s Chrome browser early next year. This brings nearly all premium content providers in a bad situation, as they have to switch technologies and find a future-proof solution within weeks. This means that premium streaming media publishers will not be able to rely on Microsoft PlayReady DRM to secure their content on the Google Chrome platforms on PCs and Android devices. This requires them to re-evaluate their content protection and streaming platform strategy, and find a future-proof solutions and switch technologies in the short term.

bitmovin provides the answer today – announcing the addition of DRM capabilities to its bitdash MPEG-DASH player for HTML5 and Flash, allowing premium content providers to continue to manage and protect their premium Live and On-Demand streaming services on HTML5-based platforms (such as Google Chrome and Android, Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 8) with a standards-based, flexible and future-proof DRM support. In addition to the HTML5 supported platforms, bitdash also provides Flash-based fallback solutions for DRM protected MPEG-DASH content for other platforms - such as older versions Internet Explorer - from a single vendor solution.

For many content providers MPEG-DASH has emerged as the technology of choice, thus DASH project roll-outs accelerate as HTML5 MSE/EME with Widevine DRM ranks top in the list of viable alternatives. Furthermore, MPEG-CENC makes it possible to support separate DRM systems with one version of protected content and HTML5 EME is based on the HTML MSE for MPEG-DASH based content. So this combination gives content providers additional arguments to move towards MPEG-DASH as an international standard-based as well as approach with full flexibility on the streaming, DRM and CDN side.

On top of providing flexible DRM capabilities in a single player for any platform, bitdash provides a single codebase solution build from the ground up that delivers advanced bitrate adaption performance, which outperforms existing solutions such as Smooth Streaming or Apple’s HLS. On top of this, bitdash leverages the benefits of MPEG-DASH enabling to use audio and video separately, enabling also multiple audio languages and version, as well as Live and On-Demand streaming up to 4K/UHD resolutions, proven interoperability with a wide range of leading encoding platforms, multiple audio/language and subtitles/caption support, DVR features such as Pause/Seek and detailed reporting on users, usage and QoS metrics.

A free version of the bitdash MPEG-DASH player is available at www.dash-player.com, and interoperability with MPEG-DASH content generated by a range of encoders and streaming servers is illustrated at www.dash-player.com/demo/.

A demo of bitdash’ Widevine Modular DRM support, which was created together with bitmovin’s technology partner Unified Streaming, is available at www.dash-player.com/demo/widevine-modular/ (requires Google Chrome) and a demo of Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM support in bitdash can also be found at www.dash-player.com/demo/playready-demo/ (requires Internet Explorer 11 using Windows 8).