Hollywood studios pushing for secure, next-generation "digital home library"

24.10.2012
Home entertainment today is often provided through a clutter of TVs, tablets, and computers, along with TV specialty boxes for yet more streaming video or music services. But some Hollywood studios are hoping to find better ways to deliver paid content to consumers directly to hard drives and flash storage, according to Cryptography Research, which is working on a futuristic project to do that.

SECURITY NEWS:

Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist at Cryptography Research, says his firm is working on this anti-piracy and content management project on behalf of a consortium led by SanDisk, Twentieth Century Fox, and Warner Bros., among others. These companies, part of the Secure Content Storage Association, have tapped Cryptography Research to try and come up with encryption-based technology that could be used to allow consumers to access entertainment content and create digital home libraries from a wide variety of sources while preventing piracy of that content.

The Hollywood studios, says Kocher, are looking to the future and they are considering local hard drives and flash-memory based storage, such as USB thumb drives, as important mechanisms for video where crypto functions would grant user permission to gain content.

"Today I can buy a hard disk for 200 terabytes and in theory that could hold a lot of movies I could buy," Kocher says. If this crypto-design project works out and there's no guarantee it will it would represent a new way that content providers could grant full digital downloads or just streaming based on the price the user wants to pay.

The Hollywood studios "don't want 95% of their market eaten up by piracy," Kocher says, but they face a slew of daunting piracy problems. Among them, broadband-cable content providers and satellite-based providers face continual attacks to break into their content-control mechanism, such as set-top boxes, he says.