castLabs supports Huawei WisePlay DRM
August 26, 2021
By Colin Mann
Digital video delivery technologist castLabs is supporting Huawei Technologies’ WisePlay digital rights management (DRM) system to enable streaming services to reach a wider range of devices with secure premium content.
WisePlay is now integrated into castLabs’ range of video delivery solutions including the company’s scalable DRMtoday cloud licensing service. DRMtoday helps streaming businesses quickly launch monetised service while protecting their valuable media assets by providing studio-recognised security for online, offline, and live playback.
WisePlay joins DRMtoday’s security system roster on top of Google Widevine, Microsoft PlayReady, and Apple’s FairPlay Streaming DRM for OTT services as well as Widevine CAS for pay-TV operators. Current and future customers can now safely deliver protected media content across Huawei phones and tablets running EMUI or HarmonyOS smart TVs that are compatible with WisePlay.
“Working with castLabs has been a great experience,” commented James Xu, Consumer Cloud Service and Video Business Dept Director, Huawei Video. “We believe that a whole new range of customers will now benefit from the availability of WisePlay DRM along with castLabs within our combined secure, scalable solution.”
ChinaDRM is an open DRM standard based on cryptographic industry standards which are applied to authorise certificates so devices from various manufacturers can achieve a secure connection to DRM services. Based on the core ChinaDRM initiative, WisePlay was developed by Huawei for natively integrated media protection across their own branded devices. It supports a range of features to meet strict studio requirements including running at the software or hardware security level as well as a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) on supported devices to enable high quality UHD and HDR content. The DRM system can also be used with MPEG-DASH and HLS streaming formats as well as the Common Encryption (CENC) standard.
“As the content protection landscape continues to shift, we’re committed to helping businesses adapt to changes by removing barriers and making delivery as accessible as possible,” explained Bryce Pedersen, Global Marketing Strategy at castLabs. “We’re excited to provide excellent additional value by including WisePlay as part of our easy to use and cost-saving technology which serves billions of licences each year. Our customers can now securely deploy amazing experiences that audiences will love to even more devices with premium content playing anywhere.”
castLabs’ PRESTOplay player also now ships with built-in WisePlay support making it simple to publish secure streaming apps on Huawei’s AppGallery. Developers can quickly create EMUI and HarmonyOS apps with advanced audience experiences including the latest player features as well as performance enhancements designed to speed-up deployment and lower development costs.
PRESTOplay additionally allows Widevine or PlayReady DRM processed content to be automatically used with WisePlay licensing. Existing media libraries don’t need to be modified as PRESTOplay will generate a WisePlay PSSH box dynamically on the client side based on existing content data. This allows Widevine and PlayReady encrypted media to be safely streamed on-the-fly, further helping customers deliver efficiently to Huawei devices.
castLabs’ Video Toolkit cloud service, which rapidly encodes, packages, watermarks, and encrypts VoD content into ready-to-stream DRM-enabled formats, also includes support for generating WisePlay-compatible filesets.