Chapter 13: Movie Rentals

Overview

In part III, you’ve seen how Contoso Movies Online built a production workstation for encoding content and produced a live event. We also saw how they created three types of content: on-demand content, server-side playlists for the movie info channels, and broadcast content for the live event channel.

In this chapter, we will walk through the process by which the Contoso staff will create a fourth type of content for the site: Windows Media files that have been encrypted using Windows Media Rights Manager. With their inventory of movies secure, the Contoso Movies Online team can move ahead with the rest of their plans to create an e-commerce system and implement their model for generating revenue with movie rentals.

Windows Media Rights Manager is the Microsoft DRM solution for protecting Windows Media-based content. The encryption process is half of the system. In order to fully understand how Windows Media Rights Manager works, we will also describe the process of generating and sending licenses to clients so the content can be played. In this chapter we will explore Windows Media Rights Manager, how it ties into the e-commerce solution, and how to create a sample Windows Media Rights Manager solution.