The digital rights management (DRM) technology has become the preferred protection system against piracy and for effective user management for premium video content in the OTT space. All established and emerging OTT platforms, including influencer-centric apps, use the DRM technology to stem revenue leakage to the piracy market. International tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Apple dominate the DRM market with their offerings Widevine, PlayReady, and FairPlay respectively. OTT platforms need to incorporate all popular DRM technologies for their video assets to comprehensively cover a fragmented device market, which takes them to multi-DRM SaaS vendors.
Many engineers and platform owners are confused about pricing models in the multi-DRM space, since it involves two components, namely multi-DRM vendors and DRM technology providers, like Google. DRM-protected content is encrypted using the technologies mentioned above and is packaged by a multi-DRM SaaS provider. While an app developer can directly integrate a DRM technology using its SDK, the multiplicity of these technologies and ease of integration comes with per user cost. Multi-DRM SaaS providers tend to tailor their offerings keeping in mind both new platforms that may be in the process of acquiring its first set of customers as well as market leaders, like Netflix and Amazon Prime, whose aim is to protect their user base against piracy and leakage of subscription data.
The DRM technologies are generally free to incorporate natively, but seamless integration of multiple such technologies comes at a price. Multi-DRM vendors provide DRM solutions as a free trial for new OTT app developers to test the market and integration process. Usually such a free trial lasts for about a month and covers a maximum of 1,000 active licenses on up to a specific number of users, which can range from 50 to 100. A multi-DRM SaaS often requires a powerful CDN for storing packaged encrypted video assets. Multi-DRM vendors tend to integrate their services with CDNs, like AWS and Akamai, and offer an integrated billing option for both services, which makes payment timely, easier, and safe. OTT companies can choose suitable plans on these CDNs both for storing and delivering their videos as well as applying DRM licenses.
The multi-DRM pricing is mostly dynamic in nature, allowing new players to fresh markets at a minimum monthly cost of up to 1,000 active users. Beyond this, multi-DRM vendors charge in rate slabs as the number of MAUs increases.
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