Irdeto Control to boost OTT monetization by management & geo-enforcement

Irdeto, the world leader in digital platform cybersecurity, today announces that its industry-awarded multi-DRM solution Irdeto Control extended its concurrent stream management and geo-enforcement capabilities to not only effectively address service abuses, including piracy and credential sharing, but now also allow operators to define and monetize their over-the-top (OTT) offerings using diverse concurrency models based on subscriber, content and device segmentation. With these new capabilities, pay-TV operators and media companies are enabled to quickly introduce new OTT business models and accelerate revenue growth by addressing new customer segments and increasing average revenue per user (ARPU).

Irdeto Control concurrent stream management leverages DRM-based “heartbeats”, known to be more secure and accurate, to replace the traditional player-based heartbeat method, which requires custom development for each device/player. Irdeto’s unique approach is app agnostic and does not require custom code to be developed or maintained at the application or platform level. It prevents any attempt to circumvent the systems’ heartbeats, enabling operators to accurately enforce content and service usage rules in real-time.

Irdeto Control also extended its geo-IP enforcement offerings, adding capabilities for pay-TV operators and streaming services to dynamically perform “blacklisting” and “whitelisting” of subscribers’ device IP addresses, offering vast flexibility to enforce geo-restrictions from a subscriber level, content level or both. Based on subscribers’ location, operators can deploy targeted strategies by country, region, or city. The new capabilities also include innovative tools to detect and block VPN and proxy services, impeding any attempt to circumvent the geo-restrictions.

In addition to these new capabilities, Irdeto now co-hosts Widevine SDK as part of Irdeto Control (Hosted Widevine Services) to further extend its current industry-leading availability and SLAs (99.999%). This new offering provides additional benefits to operators and media companies with improved user experience (low latency), managed change control, and dedicated monitoring capabilities to guarantee the required scalability and resiliency for high-profile events. Irdeto Control can assist operators in expanding consumer offerings with insight-driven data while offering the highest degree of DRM protection, availability, scalability and operational simplicity.

“Our company has built and maintained strong relationships with more than 30 leading OTT streaming services globally. This has led us to issue nearly 50 billion DRM licenses in the last 12 months, including over 4.5 billion DRM licenses in a single month. These new capabilities are evidence of Irdeto’s forefront positioning in the industry, solving the most complex challenges for operators and media companies. We are happy to be presenting such a remarkable update to our customers,” said Shane McCarthy, COO of Video Entertainment at Irdeto.