Innovations

Marlin DRM

Intertrust is a founding and active member of the Marlin Developer Community (MDC). Marlin DRM is an open-standard content protection system for consumer devices and services. It offers sophisticated rights management for playing entertainment and media content distributed over Mobile, Broadband, Broadcast, and all other popular channels. Since Marlin is not a proprietary technology, it is able to deliver content over any network or physical media. It seamlessly ports licensed content across devices and services in a consumer’s home or personal domain and supports a large and flexible set of business models for content distribution, including yet-to-be-defined business models.

Five companies — Intertrust, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung and Sony — joined together in 2005 to develop the Marlin DRM specifications. The Marlin founders also created the Marlin Trust Management Organization, to license commercial adopters and verify compliance with Marlin's robustness rules. The Marlin initiative offers a rich media distribution platform that includes a solutions provider program and trust services necessary for market deployment. Marlin’s ecosystem creates a dynamic model for market development.

Marlin technology is consumer electronics and mobile friendly, compatible with all popular operating systems, platforms, codecs, file formats, and delivery systems. The technology is easy to configure and implement on multiple server and client platforms. Marlin supports various content distribution models like download, progressive download, streaming, adaptive streaming, and broadcast.

Several national initiatives and other standards bodies have adopted Marlin. YouView in the UK, Tivù in Italy and the IPTV Forum Japan currently use Marlin DRM as their sole content protection technology. Since the Japanese initiative kicked off in 2007, Marlin technology is used in the vast majority of popular Internet TV services, such as AcTVilla. HbbTV groups in France and Spain have also selected Marlin as one of their DRM options. Other standards-based ecosystems such as Ultraviolet have approved Marlin for distributing premium Hollywood content. The Open IPTV Forum (OIPF) has integrated Marlin for ‘over the top’ IPTV delivery, and the ChinaDRM standard also refers to Marlin technologies in its specifications. In addition, a growing number of TVs, network Bluray Players, Home Cinema sets, MP3/MP4 players, and Internet enabled televisions from most major manufacturers. In all, there is a growing based of over 200 million Marlin-enabled devices in the market.

Marlin is competitively priced against all competitors, it is based on open standards and therefore eliminates proprietary agendas; The Marlin Simple Secure Streaming (MS3) technology is free to service providers willing to operate their own servers using a simple off-the-shelf Web Server software. Free packaging tools for formatting, encryption (including MPEG DASH), which can be used for Video-on-Demand and Live, are also available. There are also options for service providers who wish to build richer distribution models (e.g., offline use on mobile).


Intertrust's Marlin Solutions

To make it easier for service providers, device makers, and others to implement Marlin-based products and services quickly and easily, Intertrust developed software.

In addition to providing SDKs, Intertrust, through its Seacert subsidiary, is a one-stop shop for providing trust services to Marlin adopters. Over 95% of Marlin's 35-plus adopters have outsourced trust management services to Seacert.

SyncTV, another Intertrust subsidiary, has recently joined the Marlin Partner Program. This means that the Marlin ecosystem can quickly deploy a Marlin solution based on SyncTV's service.