To drm or not to drm that is the question?

Well I'm a DRM provider but I'll play devil's advocate and give you the Cons.

DRM support is an absolute mess on Macs. Expect to piss off your mac users. Even if you add V1 support (which works on mac) around 40% of the time things are not configured right and they can't get it to work.

The DRM component on a small percentage of Windows computers is fucked. This problem is worse on Win9x, and for older versions of Windows Media Player (7 and 8). When the component is fucked the user can't get a license to play the content which obviously doesn't go over that well. In certain cases the problem can be fixed by upgrading to the latest version of WMP but that mainly helps users on XP systems who can upgrade to WMP 10 (which as a much better version of the DRM component than wmp 7-9).

No user's out there are asking for DRM so merely having it will upset some percentage of them. No user in the history of the internet has been happier because DRM was added to a file.

It's crackable. It's a royal pain in the ass, but you can run screen recording software, or if you have just the right configuration can run a little known crack program. (Not FreeMe). Luckily doing this is beyond the scope of 99% of users.

So those are the honest cons from someone who makes money providing DRM services.

thanks for your honest reply. that is very helpful.

what are the pros?

Do they outweigh the cons?

I'll read this one tomorrow.

Last year bunches of programs suddenly all had to have drm.

Back then i said it will fail.

Today most of those program owners dropped drm....because it failed.

Instead of getting higher retention you only get higher cb's.

Something which is very predictable but for some reason people had to spend 1000's to find out first.

Like djscrib said, getting a DRM solution to work on all systems is a pain in the ass and most likely won't work on all systems. Take windows DRM for example - for predelivery (delivering a license before the video is streamed), it won't work in Firefox because the activex component necessary isn't supported.

However, you also a bunch of things going for you when you have DRM'd content: pay per minute, pay per download, rental payment options, as well as protecting your content in case it's stolen.

2 pennies.

Avoid djscrib aka VidLock

http://www.natnetdrm.com/
http://www.webairdrm.com/
http://www.jupiterhosting.com/b_drm.html

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

I was considering using DRM for member area videos, but decided against it

it wont help retention unless you have some shit-hot exclusive content, and even then the cb rate will still be higher

You get what you pay for.

At least they reply to sales e-mails.

My partner never recieved a single reply from you.

But go ahead and make it look like you didn't ignore them.

If any affiliate webmaster wants to promote via P2P using DRM videos for free, try SmutLounge:

http://www.smutlounge.com/

The Paris Hilton video is one of the exceptions for DRM and qualifies under the "shit-hot" category. Although I think the 5 play license was going a bit overboard.

Anyhow, if you ever do DRM your member area videos, jump in slowly, don't convert all of them at once and post them online. Do a few at a time to test the waters and user reactions first.

what are you talking about you tool... DJscribe does exelent work..

hell i havnt seen you post anything usefull yet, so why dont you run along you troll!

I'll cut Master some slack. My customer email support has been poor at times in the past and I'll admit it (his partner might have fallen through the cracks).

Having a service and offering Free Accounts pretty much opens the customer support email up to some pretty stupid shit (people asking for pay as they go accounts for like 17 cents per month, emails containing no verbs, people expecting international phone support for their free account, etc. etc. etc.) and a few times in the past I only responded to the paying customers.

So my bad on not responding to your partner. I'm a dev not a customer support person by trade but am working on it

Trust a Certified DRM provider

Hello All-

Just adding my 2 cents, I would actually go with a MS Certified DRM provider. That way you know you are getting the latest and greatest in DRM technology, support and benefits.

The below are a few links.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...solutions.aspx
And
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/win...providers.aspx

If you would like to try http://www.ezdrm.com contact we and we can set you up with a Proof of Concept account so you can try before you buy.

www.ezdrm.com