Thomson, the giant French consumer electronics technology company, will be introducing a new set of technologies for B2B content security in the film industry. NexGuard will be shown at the NAB trade show next month in Las Vegas and is expected to become generally available in June.
NexGuard is an evolutionary step beyond existing solutions for curbing pre-release piracy that results from "inside jobs," i.e., the actions of employees of media companies and their service bureaus, such as mastering labs (in the music industry) and post-production houses (in film and video, such as Thomson's own Technicolor). Existing entrants into this market for music include Activated Content (US), Musicrypt (Canada), Interoute (UK), and MusicPoint (Australia). NexGuard is the most comprehensive B2B security technology that we know of for video content.
This type of solution has two key selling points. In addition to its effect on pre-release piracy, it also gives content owners the confidence to use the Internet instead of physical media, which takes longer and can cost more to send. Ease of use has been the primary bottleneck -- not only must the security be minimally invasive, but the application must be simple enough for a nontechnical user.
Thomson is offering NexGuard as a set of technology components that they can integrate into solutions for customers -- such as post houses and film studios -- or as SDKs that third parties can integrate. The two off-the-shelf components that Thomson has built include the secure file transfer capability and a secure viewer.
NexGuard takes a markedly different approach to B2B DRM than existing players in the market. Instead of authenticating on the basis of user identities through passwords, like many of the above vendors (Musicrypt also uses a "biometric" based on how a user types her password), NexGuard uses secure tokens, which can be USB "keys" or SmartCards. This means that users don't have to memorize passwords, but instead they could hand their tokens to other people or lose them. It also means that administrators only need to manage a set of hardware tokens instead of the more onerous user IDs. Yet the use of hardware tokens could make NexGuard a tougher sell for certain applications, like the distribution of "screener" copies of films.
The secure viewer concept is another more radical approach to this type of application; the only similar solution we know of in the world of PC (or Mac) DRM platforms is Enterprise DRM vendor RightsMarket's secure document viewer, which is based on the OutsideIn universal text viewing application from Stellent. The secure viewer is used in NexGuard applications where end users do not need to modify content, such as screener distribution. Such users would use the NexGuard secure viewer instead of a standard video player such as Windows Media Player (for PCs) or QuickTime (for Macs). The secure rendering application architecture is risky, because it entails user training, software support and maintenance issues that would otherwise be the province of a much larger software vendor; but for the simple act of video playback, these concerns should not be too great.
For applications in which users need to modify digital video, such as post houses, NexGuard simply decrypts content. In this case, NexGuard's primary value is protecting content in transit, and thus it competes with several other more generic technologies for secure file distribution.
NexGuard's two core security technologies are 128-bit AES encryption for content and a forensic watermarking scheme from NextAmp, a French company that Thomson acquired in July 2005 and whose technology has roots in the Fraunhofer research labs of Germany. The watermarking scheme inserts an indication of the receiving user's identity into the content when it is decrypted.
NexGuard conveys content licenses to clients that specify which hardware tokens are authorized to play or decrypt content; future versions of the technology will include licenses that can limit the number of plays or time window in which playback is allowed.
NexGuard represents a natural step forward, not only in technology but also in movie studios' attitudes about piracy among insiders and business partners. It is a poorly-kept secret that the majority of pre-release piracy is the result of inside jobs; the studios are slowly realizing they must admit and address the problem. It will be interesting to see whether the studios and their partners will accept Thomson's more radical approach to security.
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