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Perspectives on building technology businesses from Cartezia

Digital Rights Management

DRM is a term used to describe technologies used for the copyright protection of digital content. Secure documents are encrypted with permissions information and controls that have minimal impact on authorized users of the documents. There are two broad approaches to DRM:containment, typically encrypting content so that it can only be accessed by authorized users; and marking, inclusion of a 'flag', watermark or tag to signal to a device that the content or medium is 'copy protected'. Restriction can be hardware or software based. Many DRM schemes are vendor or publisher specific. A consumer might accordingly end up with several incompatible DRM implementations on a single device, some potentially conflicting with each other.

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Online video consumption grows, but pricing and business model challenges still remain

In spite of increasing consumption, the challenge of monetising online video content still remains as evidenced by the experience of YouTube and Hulu.

Arun Muthirulan, 10 March 2010

Disney’s partnership with Hulu will change the rules in online video distribution

Disney’s investment and joint-venture partnership with ad-supported streaming video site Hulu, will seriously impact existing players like Google’s YouTube and Apple's iTunes service. More »

Arun Muthirulan, 02 May 2009

Content owners cannot rely on Ads to compensate for declining Music revenues

Falling revenue growth and pricing pressures mean that ad-supported business models cannot compensate for declining music revenues. More »

Sarita Jones, 31 March 2009

Hollywood changes its distribution model-but only in Korea for now

Warner Brothers Entertainment will release its films online in South Korea before they are released in the country on DVD, in a major break from the established Hollywood distribution model which could lead to a big increase in movie downloads. The film studio, which is part of Time Warner, has... More »

Sarita Jones, 15 October 2008

Apple's multi-prong strategy pays off

Apple's multi-prong strategy, hatched in the tough times from 2001 to 2003, is now paying off handsomely. In those difficult days when revenues stayed stubbornly flat, and margins hovered around zero, Apple re-invented its core Mac range of computers, and launched the iPod and iTunes to become a... More »

Uday Phadke, 31 March 2008

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