The next obvious question becomes – what do you consider a license? In order to implement DRM, there are three major things that need to happen.

1. In order to encrypt the content, it must be encoded into a suitable streaming format and then packaged using encryption keys –MPEG-DASH for PlayReady and Widevine and HLS for FairPlay.

2. The Middleware or CMS must be able to allow you to authenticate your user and pass a token or, in our case, an authentication xml to the player. This authentication xml is encrypted and digitally signed by you and includes the rights that you would like to express to the user.

3. The player will notice that the content is encrypted and first check to see if it already has a license to play the content. If it does not, it will ping our server for the decryption key.

4. Each response = 1 license with each license tied to the specific device that is consuming the content.

How often that happens depends on several different factors. The first is how that content packaged. In a VOD scenario, if each title is packaged with a separate encryption key, for the user to consume different titles a new license will have to be delivered for each new piece of content viewed on each device. However, if an entire catalogue of content is encrypted with a single key, a single license will unlock the entire catalogue.

Similarly, for Live content, if each channel is package with a separate key then each channel will require a separate license. If they are packaged with the same key, then a single license will unlock them all.