Case study: Safe video delivery on multiple platforms using DRMtoday with pre-integrated PRESTOplay player SDKs

Objective

MUBI is a global film platform that provides its members with a hand-curated selection of the world’s best films on demand, streaming on its proprietary technology. It came from the idea of giving as many people as possible the ability to watch beautiful and interesting films, on different devices and screens, anywhere and at any time. MUBI users can also discuss and rate films and access its international film criticism and news publication on Notebook. MUBI is also a producer and film distributor.

MUBI was looking for a way to protect their video content and distribute it on multiple devices. The solution also had to perform in online and offline scenarios, as films are available to download for offline viewing on some devices.

Challenge

In addition, MUBI was also in need of players that could allow their members to view movies on different devices all over the world, as it’s available in over 190 countries. Not only did the solution have to be easy and quick to implement for their team of developers but also provide reliable technical support for further customization. Some of the features they searched for were subtitle support, progressive download as well as consistent playback on Android and iOS devices in addition to HTML5/JavaScript platforms.

“castLabs is a trusted and long-time partner of MUBI’s. They are a pioneer in this space and their specialist technology offers us maximum security, enabling us to bring our incredible selection of hand-picked films to members around the world, across multiple platforms and devices, in the securest way possible.”

Federico Keen, CTO at MUBI

Solution

DRMtoday licensing solution lets OTT businesses quickly launch monetized services without worrying about how to meet content owner security requirements. The multi-DRM service allows MUBI to reach different devices and platforms with protected content providing maximum reach. castLabs designed a powerful autoscaling server structure across multiple AWS regions worldwide to avoid outages with exceptional fault-tolerant redundancy expanding on what AWS already provides. This makes the solution highly scalable and reliable, answering the needs of MUBI. The speedy network minimizes key delivery time wherever customers are allowing them to enjoy video sooner. Operating as a license delivery network, DRMtoday provides the highest quality content licensing with a single API integration to streamline key ingestion and cloud-based DRM. DRMtoday is also pre-integrated with Unified Origin from Unified Streaming for key ingestion which MUBI was already using.

Aside from a global multi-DRM license delivery network, the pre-integrated PRESTOplay SDK suite provides “API-first” players for rapid player creation. PRESTOplay SDKs provides players across multiple screens such as Android devices and Android TV, iOS devices and Apple TV, HTML5 platforms including browsers, Windows/macOS desktops, game consoles, and TVs.

MUBI was looking for a solution that could support online and offline playback to uphold all of the potential scenarios of watching their video assets. castLabs’ players offer a straight-forward approach to make it easy for developers to implement this feature on all platforms. It allows viewers to watch content in the ways they want while remaining secure, also when DRM-protected content is downloaded to their devices to watch without internet connection. To ensure content is protected to studio-grade standards, PRESTOplay’s downloader feature facilitates license download for major DRM technologies including Microsoft® PlayReady®, Google Widevine™ Modular, and FairPlay Streaming by Apple. Streaming service providers send video manifest files specifying multiple quality renditions for download, audio tracks, and subtitle tracks. Additionally they provide the packaged content files for playback in either MPEG-DASH or Smooth Streaming. Selected tracks are downloaded by the SDK for offline playback, along with content and metadata that ensures PRESTOplay knows which tracks are available and from where.

The team of castLabs’ technical experts worked closely with MUBI to support progressive download which allows them to encode at higher bit rates than one could when delivering via streaming, because even if the data rate exceeds the viewer’s connection bandwidth, ultimately, it’ll reside on the viewer’s hard drive, from which it will play smoothly.

Another requirement which was imperative for MUBI to make the films accessible to a wider audience, was the support of Timed Text Markup Language (TTML) subtitles. PRESTOplay allows the use of a single Common Subtitle API, to achieve an identical display behaviour of subtitle formats including TTML and WebVTT across all of their players, also compliant with FCC guidelines. This helps to avoid performance and rendering irregularity as well as inconsistencies across platforms.

Result

Working with MUBI has allowed castLabs to accompany them through each step of the process and support them as they grew throughout the years. The team at castLabs worked closely together with developers from MUBI’s team and assisted with customization requirements to deliver their service across all of the platforms they targeted. These platforms include smartphones and tablets, smart TVs, browsers, game consoles, and streaming media players (Amazon Fire TV, Roku, etc).

castLabs’ trusted technical consulting team with their deep expertise in challenging setups was always available to help achieve MUBI’s video delivery goals. Not only troubleshooting the integration but assisting throughout the years of working together.

While castLabs continues working with MUBI to allow everyone, everywhere to stream and download an ever-changing collection of hand-picked films, from new directors to award-winners across the world, they are happy to be a part of the journey in this ever-growing industry.