Reflecting on 20 Years of Streaming Security Innovation

We wanted to express our great pleasure at reaching the significant business milestone – 20 years of protecting and enhancing revenue streams. Below we reflect on some of the lessons of our time in business, and voice our gratitude for the support of customers, partners and colleagues along the way.

Our CEO, when put on the spot for this blog, expressed a particular perspective that comes from the front lines of the streaming business. "Despite the wealth of industry experience and knowledge that is available to those embarking on a new streaming business venture, we all too often see that security is only addressed after feeling the pain of revenue loss," says David Eisenbacher, co-founder and CEO. "This missing element is, to some extent, rooted in a concern about complexity, and addressing this has shaped our company mission over the years. Where we can make the application of security simple, we can help ensure that it is well integrated within the overall video workflow and works seamlessly to help enforce the service business model."

Olga Kornienko, co-founder and COO re-emphasizes this. "DRM is just another tool for a company to implement and enforce their business model.  DRM does not dictate the nature of a service's business, but should be flexible and enable the customer to be in charge of their own destiny and business approach."

While this underlying philosophy has been almost a constant over the last 20 years, David is very keen to emphasize the changes seen and progress made in that time. "Open standards, developed inside the industry, have been key to improvements made in video services platforms and the video pipeline. We have, as an industry, moved from an almost wholly proprietary landscape to one based on interoperability and standardization. Service users feel the benefits every day, but so do we - we are not only technologists but consumers as well!"

"One positive aspect of this new world of standards is the potential to layer different security approaches across the business workflow," concludes Olga. "Security is a vital need, extending from glass to glass.  DRM is a part of that overall security solution, but other elements, such as watermarking and VPN detection, for example, can be vitally important as well."

Overall, both founders agree on the role of partnerships. "We would be nowhere without partners.  They make the world go round." And in this vein, we put together a 20th anniversary webinar in conjunction with a few long-time industry partners, including:

• Tricia Iboshi, CEO, Videon
• Will Law, Chief Architect – Edge Technology Group, Akamai Technologies
• Andy Beach, CTO for Media and Entertainment, Microsoft

If you didn't get to hear webinar live, we invite you to enjoy the recorded version below.

We truly appreciate all the support and friendships formed over these past 20 years.

The EZDRM Team
Digital Rights Management. Simplified.