How to prevent unauthorized access to media streams

Question

I have a client who is using Siverlight media streaming and wants to start charging for access to certain videos (pay-per-view). Many of those videos with be live-streamed.

I am looking for a solution to restrict the media streams to only the clients who have paid.

As it stands I think each video resource is located at fixed URL - if you know the URL you can watch the stream. Obviously they dont want that. To complicate it further the URL is hosted on a CDN.

There are a few products like IIS Media Services that let you restrict access to "WebPlaylists" but it does not mention about it might work with a CDN.

Are there any of the shelf solutions or are we looking at something custom?

Answer 1

You should look to use PlayReady DRM which is one of the options with Silverlight. The easiest way to do this is by working with an PlayReady service provider: http://www.microsoft.com/PlayReady/Licensing/engageprovider.mspx