DRM — Digital Rights Management — is the system that controls who can play your video and under what conditions. For a streaming service, DRM is what enforces "this paid subscriber can watch this movie on this device for 30 days, but cannot save a copy or share it". Without DRM, premium content cannot be licensed from major studios — they require it as a non-negotiable contractual condition. With DRM, the same encrypted file is delivered to every viewer, and the playback rights are enforced at the device level by hardware that the content team never touches.
Three DRM systems dominate, divided by platform owner. Widevine (Google) covers Android, Chrome, Chromecast, Android TV and the bulk of smart TVs — roughly 60 % of devices. FairPlay (Apple) covers iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS and Safari — around 25–30 %. PlayReady (Microsoft) covers Windows, Xbox, Roku, many smart TVs and set-top boxes. Together they reach 99 %+ of consumer devices. The complication: each is technically incompatible, with different license servers and key formats. But they all use the same encryption via cenc, so the same encrypted file works with all three — only the license fetch differs.
For a product team, DRM is the price of admission for premium VOD. Practical recipe: encrypt content once with CENC, integrate Widevine + FairPlay + PlayReady license servers (often through a multi-DRM service like Axinom, EZDRM, BuyDRM, Verimatrix that gives you all three via one API for ~$0.001–0.01 per stream), and let device-side DRM SDKs handle the playback dance. Hardware-level protection — Widevine L1, FairPlay with iOS Secure Enclave — is required for 4K HDR from major studios; lower tiers (Widevine L3 software-only) typically cap content at 1080p.
