Google Invests In Security

Google's acquisition of Widevine is telling. Security has not been a priority for the web giant, but as it comes into contact with the rights industry it is being forced to take this seriously.

Many leading content owners will specify the DRM to use on their content before it can be deployed.

Widevine is a real veteran that managed to survive in an industry where DRM was dominated by Microsoft and then was put on the backburner.

But before this is seen as really significant, it should be remembered that the vast majority of piracy comes from the TV, not from internet streams and cutting down on this is far more problematic.

However, this is bad news for conditional access providers such as Irdeto and NDS - an elephant has just landed on their front lawns. It is also a shot across the bows of the CDN industry, which has been horribly slow in developing a 'tv everywhere' approach, with hardly any of them supporting adaptive delivery to multiple devices and networks.