Thanks for the glowing endorsement there Master At Work. I'm glad you posted links to 3 services that all cost at least 3 times as much as mine.
DRM Pros- (Again I'm a DRM person so take what I say at your own risk).
For the average, run of the mill 30 day membership website DRM's downsides generally outweight the upsides in my opinion for content protection. In my experience you have around 4% of users running either Macs, or some very messed up Windows configurations, that will have potential DRM problems. For people paying $25/month who are planning to unsubscribe after 3 months no matter what it's not really worth the headache much of the time.
Think of it this way no user wants DRM, (and no user wants to pay for anything either of course). Placing DRM on a $25/month monthly subscription that they're used to getting DRM-free is a negative experience much of the time.
Ok so why the hell even consider DRM then?
Most people who implement these solutions are only thinking of one thing, to use their existing business model and try to reduce piracy in the hopes of encouraging people to keep their subscriptions active longer.
DRM is best applied in business or promotion models that are not really feasible when simply downloading an unprotected mpeg.
Examples.
Advertising via P2P (one of our most successful uses of Vidlock so far). When a user tries playing a DRM protected file, the default behaviour of Windows Media Player is to popup a small browser window to a url that was specified by the content owner (this only occurs if the user doesn't have a license to play the file). So think about this. Your file is being tossed around P2P without any work from you or any costs. From this you have a user that cost you 0$ in advertising to acquire staring at a little web page you control. At this point you can..
1) Just show some sort of ad for your site or another ad-paying link. I have at least 1 customer doing this raking in around 4 million hits per month. As part of a deal I'm raking 5% of that traffic and have a 1:650 conversion rate at AFF. Not the best rate but it's free traffic. Based on those numbers I imagine he's doing just dandy.
2) Collect some information before giving the user a license allowing them to play the file. It can be a page saying "THis is a xxx site video, enjoy" and then have a play button. You can collect their email, require free registration, or whatever you feel like.
3) require them to pay to play the file. Red Light does this but I imagine with a low success rate.
4) keyword advertising, P2P searches much like google have popular and unpopular keywords. Post your videos and do the P2P version of SEO to generate hits to your content which result in hits to your website.
Another P2P example would be why can't you as a content owner deliver DVD quality versions of your videos from your website? Because you'll get absolutely bent over for bandwidth fees delivering 1 GB videos. Why not DRM protect a small subset of your content (these big-ass high quality videos) and place .torrent links on your website. They're downloaded over P2P at no cost to you, but only members can actually play the things. Because a small minority of your files are offered this way your normal content offerings are drm-free and will work for everyone. We have 2 customers doing something along these lines with mixed success. I'm building a Bittorrent ActiveX control for them to make things a bit easier (instead of requiring the user to download a 3rd party bittorrent client).
True Trial content. Have a 3 day $2.99 trial but don't want your whole site ripped and then charged back? DRM protect some content and offer access to it for the trial. After 3 days if they cancel, it quits playing. ONce the user is upgraded to a full paid membership they can still view the DRM content, but also activate links to the drm-free stuff.
So those are some Pro-DRM uses to consider. I recommend trying to understand the mechanics behind DRM and then trying to think outside the box for potential uses.
DRM is a tool that has proper uses and improper uses just like an .htaccess folder. Figure out the appropriate time and place to use it.
If you have any deeper queries ping me at
[email protected]
DJScrib