Amazon Elastic Transcoder Update – PlayReady DRM Support for Smooth Streaming and HLS

My colleague Omid Behzadian sent a guest post to introduce an important new feature for Amazon Elastic Transcoder.

— Jeff;

You can now use Amazon Elastic Transcoder to apply Microsoft PlayReady DRM protection to your Smooth Streaming and HLS outputs. When creating your transcoding job, simply include the encryption key and license server URL provided by your PlayReady License Provider. Your files will be transcoded and packaged in one simple step.

The following diagram illustrates how to apply PlayReady DRM protection to your content and deliver it:

Elastic Transcoder handles the DRM packaging (the last three steps of this process) for you. Here’s the overall flow:

1. The content provider calls their DRM license provider with a key id to generate a content key.
2. The license provider uses the key id to generate a content key and returns it and a license acquisition URL to the content provider.
3. The content provider calls Amazon Elastic Transcoder with the content key, key id, and license acquisition URL.
4. Amazon Elastic Transcoder fetches the file to be protected, transcodes it, and bundles it with the DRM information.
5. Amazon Elastic Transcoder sends the DRM protected file to the Content Distribution Network (e.g., Amazon CloudFront), which distributes the file.

There are no additional charges Elastic Transcoder charges for using this new DRM packaging feature. To learn more, please consult the Securing Your Content chapter in the Elastic Transcoder Developer Guide.

— Omid Behzadian, Senior Product Manager