Developers of Project Canvas have decided they Will Use The Marlin DRM to Protect Their Premium Content. This comes after numerous breaches of the iPlayer catch up tv service protection.

Project Canvas Developers the people behind the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Five along with BT and TalkTalk ISP’s and UK broadcast transmission company Arqiva all partnering to attempt to develop a universal standard for the delivery of online catch-up services such as the BBC iPlayer, the ITV player and 4oD.

Also other web based services (including VOD and interactive TV widgets) to high speed connected Freeview and Freesat set-top boxes have published information on Project Canvas’s content protection system, which they say is designed to enable the initiative to support the widest possible range of content types for web based TV audiences.

As Project Canvas is an open platform, their members say that providers can choose to make content available with no protection or adopt transport encryption, file encryption, device authentication or DRM. In addition, they say, conditional access upgrade will be possible for content providers that require it.

The providers of premium content that include new movie releases and content which require a subscription or or downloaded Project Canvas will at launch support Marlin, which has been developed over the past five years by Intertrust, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung and Sony, as its required DRM solution.

Project Canvas members say that Marlin’s selection has follows widespread industry engagement with the content owners, content distributors, device manufacturers and ISP’s, and that this engagement led them to conclude that a common DRM solution present on all devices at launch and widely supported by content providers would benefit all industry participants. Marlin in Release 1 of the Open IPTV Forum specifications and therefore, according to the Project Canvas members, has the potential to be widely adopted as part of connected TV device deployments worldwide.

As Project Canvas members say that the publication of the group’s content protection requirements adds to the technical specification documents that they have previously made available to the industry through the Digital Television Group. They plan to submit additional technical documents on July 30th and August 19th, and say that they will make available on the Project Canvas Web site by the end of July and a timetable for the publication of other materials of relevance to device manufacturers, content providers and retailers, that will include an SDK, trade mark license and retail training materials.

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