Bayside, California, November 12, 2012 - Broadcasters and online media publishers seeking stronger protection for valuable streaming media content, including emerging over-the-top (OTT) video services, have a new choice on the market as StreamGuys introduces its enhanced SGPassKey solution for customers worldwide. The global cloud-based streaming network developed SGPassKey following customer requests to strengthen access control and simplify the user authentication process. SGPassKey employs 128-bit AES encryption — an extremely robust method for online content protection — and provides a selfgenerating authentication process to give approved users easy access to streaming content and events.
Live Asia TV, specializing in the delivery of user-subscribed live and on-demand streaming content, is among the first customers to deploy and benefit from SGPassKey. According to Metin Baruh, IT and broadcast manager for Live Asia TV, SGPassKey significantly enhances the way that it secures its overthe-top (OTT) content for clients, with the ability to easily generate user IDs, establish legal connections and control duration times for approved users. One example is Sony: Live Asia TV protects OTT content streaming to Sony BRAVIA connected TVs, more than 11 BRAVIA Blu-ray Players, Sony SNP-N200 smart streaming players and other devices.
“We have the ability to disconnect users from streams after a certain amount of time, which is a must today for live streaming,” said Baruh. “This is especially important considering that so many people today use set-top boxes, connected TVs and services like Boxee and Roku to view live streams. These devices are seldom turned off, and continue to consume bandwidth. We can better control connection durations with SGPassKey to avoid useless consumption, which saves a lot of money for our clients.”
StreamGuys initially custom-built SGPassKey to protect a top radio broadcast conglomerate’s mobile streaming services, and has now evolved it into a well-rounded product for video and audio protection. Specifically, SGPassKey is now designed so that the StreamGuys servers receive the required information from secure user tokens. Customers such as Live Asia TV integrate SGPassKey with an existing code base or user management system to generate user keys for streaming events. Once validated, users can access streams at a designated URL for a specific period of time.
The process ensures that streams are secure while simplifying matters for StreamGuys, eliminating the labor-intensive method of hosting a user database and manually reconciling user requests with approved names. Most importantly, the highly secure encryption method of SGPassKey ensures that specialized content and intellectual property remains protected for broadcasters and other online publishers.
“Most content owners want to prevent having their content posted on YouTube or aggregator sites for free, except when it’s part of an overarching strategy,” said Jonathan Speaker, COO of StreamGuys. “They potentially wind up losing viewers as well as advertising and subscription revenue. Meanwhile, chasing down anonymous accounts with these sites becomes a time-sink and a hassle with hundreds of DCMA forms to file. SGPassKey gives our customers the confidence of knowing that their content is secure and locked down.”
Baruh adds that SGPassKey is easy to integrate with different systems, noting that Live Asia TV can share the solution with other companies to widen protection across other consumer devices. This flexibility can grow into a special reseller model that offers a wider revenue-generating opportunity.
“We can structure SGPassKey to offer multiple encryption layers,” said Speaker. “This allows us to create a reseller package for clients who want to offer a turnkey solution for OTT streaming that reaches across multiple companies or media organizations.”