Developing the Contoso Movies Online Solution

The Contoso Movies Online site will encode and encrypt movie files using DRM profiles. One DRM profile can be used for multiple movies, with the same license key seed used to encrypt the content and generate licenses. The part of the encryption process that differentiates the content is the key ID, which is generated each time session properties are saved prior to encoding. To increase security, however, a new DRM profile that contains a new seed is generated periodically.

To set up Windows Media Encoder in order to create a new DRM profile and encrypt content, the Contoso staff do the following:

1. In Session Properties of the encoder, configure settings to encode content, such as adding a source, setting the output, and setting the compression.

2. On the Security tab, click New.

3. Select a license provider or add a new one, and then click Generate. The provider’s DRM profile configuration Web page opens.

4. Enter the appropriate information, and then start the process on the page. A DRM profile is installed on your computer.

5. Select the Use DRM to protect content from unauthorized use check box, click the new DRM profile, and then click Apply.

When the operator starts the encoder, the stream will be encrypted. The key ID can be saved in a database if it will be needed in the future to encode content that uses the same license. If the operator enters a key ID value in Session Properties, the encoder will use that value rather than generate a new one.

DRM profiles will be used primarily to secure movie content. However, they can also be used to encrypt a live stream. For example, the site could have an exclusive deal to cover an important event that they would want to charge a rental fee for or offer only to special customers. In that case, a new DRM profile, a different set of rights, and a new sign-up page may be required. The process is basically the same as for renting movies, except a live stream would be received by a client instead of an on-demand stream.

The Contoso Movies Online site is ready to create Windows Media files and live streams, and the CDN is prepared to deliver the content to end users over the Internet. With the new production workstation, site personnel can capture and encode video received from production companies, and they can encrypt movies and other rental content with Windows Media Rights Manager. In addition, the producer can use the Playlist Editor to create server-side playlists for the info channels, and she has a system for producing live events.

In part III, we focused on creating content and relying on outside services for distributing the streams. In part IV, we see how a larger company plans and deploys a complete Windows Media system on an enterprise network. The company will deploy systems for creating content, and will also deploy servers and configure the network infrastructure to distribute live and on-demand content to every desktop in the enterprise.