Content Creation and Distribution: Why Security Management is a Prime Need for CME Players

Venu Venugopal, VP, CA

One of the key transformations in the communications industry over the past five years is the convergence of communications, media and entertainment (CME) markets. With this, content and customer centricity became the primary business focus and internet protocol (IP) became the technology norm. The later and the emergence of the Internet as a distribution channel and World Wide Web as the customer interface point have had significant implications on the CME value chain from a security perspective.

Look at the typical content creators like filmed entertainment companies or television studios. In the case of movies, most content is created in weeks now, compared to months a few years back. As these go-to-market timeframe gets compressed, a number of steps in the creation process are being done in parallel. For example, film directors nowadays send in content shot in off-site locations on a daily basis to a central repository, so that stakeholders like special effects teams and editors can work on the content as it is created. This adds enormous complexity, as content gets distributed in pieces, often over a public IP network, and a number of users access, manipulate and augment the content in parallel. Even small pieces of the content reaching unauthorized users can result in millions of dollars in terms of business loss, besides legal ramifications, brand dilution, etc. Role and policy based access control, encryption of data, single sign-on with stringent authentication, authorization, and auditing, etc., become key prerequisite in the implementation.

Another challenge in the filmed entertainment industry is the disparate number of applications in use in the content creation process itself – as most of the studios have grown over a series of mergers and acquisitions and various units are different stages in transformation to a fully digital environment. As one studio executive in charge of IT strategy remarked to me the other day, “One of my primary challenges is that we have hundreds of applications in use to manage the content creation process and associated value chain. Providing a centralized access control into these applications, based on user roles and in line with corporate policies, is a critical need for us to transform ourselves as a leader in the digital world.”

There are similar security challenges in taking the content to the end users, once the creation process is complete. In the case of filmed content, an increasing number of theaters are becoming digital and hence the content is more and more getting distributed digitally to those consumption end points. Ensuring that the content is only received by an authorized end-point with adequate protections against unauthorized use and copying (like digital rights management) are extremely critical. In the case of TV programmes and music content - whether it is Desperate Housewives downloaded from ABC’s website or American Idol performers’ albums on iTunes - the internet and world-wide-web are the final frontiers in getting content to end-consumers quickly, cost effectively and (more importantly) as, when and where the consumer wants it. Ensuring digital rights and secure distribution again becomes a key need in these scenarios.

These needs are not any different when similar content is pushed through a distributor network, instead of the Internet, like the cable service provider, as Video on Demand (VoD). As Robert Iger, CEO of Walt Disney noted in his keynote at the first TelecomNext event in 2006, "Without content protection, investment in content can't be supported. We need secure distribution.” In fact, that is exactly what industry forums like the TM Forum will have to tackle and already investing in, from standards and technology frameworks perspective, as the converged world of communications, media and entertainment become more and more digital and customer centric.

Venu Venugopal, PhD, is the VP of Solutions Marketing at CA (Computer Associates) with responsibility for leading CA’s solutions strategy and marketing efforts into the Communications, Media and Entertainment industry. Previously he was the Director of Product Management for Security Software solutions at CA. Prior to joining CA in 2004 he was a Senior Manager for Product Management and Marketing at Sprint, where he founded and directed Sprint’s IP Virtual Private Networking and Managed Security Services, a portfolio of twelve global services. His tenure at Sprint also included positions as Senior Manager for Network Security Services and Principal Program Manager for Managed Network Services.

Prior to his eight years at Sprint, he was a Research Faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and a Senior Software Engineer at Wipro, Bangalore, India. He is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and the University of Maryland, College Park, US, and holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MBA in Marketing. He has over 35 publications and conference presentation to his credit.