Envivio 4Caster C4 is First Carrier-Grade Encoding Platform to Support Microsoft Silverlight DRM-Protected IIS Live Smooth Streaming

Enables Operators to Enhance Quality of Experience and Ensure Premium Content is Delivered Securely to Internet TV and Mobile TV Subscribers

South San Francisco, CA. – Envivio Inc., the leading provider of compression solutions for Three Screens video convergence, announced today that its award-winning 4Caster™ C4 is the first carrier-grade video encoder with comprehensive support for both Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.0 (IIS) Live Smooth Streaming and Silverlight DRM, powered by PlayReady. The integration of these technologies into the 4Caster C4 offers service providers a complete professional headend solution for highly secure, high quality content delivery to Microsoft Silverlight clients on PCs, Macs and mobile devices. Envivio will demonstrate IIS Live Smooth Streaming with Silverlight DRM at NAB 2009 in Las Vegas from April 20 – 23, 2009 at Booth SU2424.

“Consumer demand for sophisticated and highly secure live and on-demand online entertainment is both increasing and maturing year over year,” said Steve Sklepowich, group product manager for Silverlight at Microsoft Corp. “Smooth Streaming and Silverlight DRM, paired with Envivio’s encoding platform, enable the delivery of true HD and highly secure video to a wide range of devices over the public IP infrastructure.”

IIS Smooth Streaming is Microsoft’s HTTP-based adaptive streaming platform that consistently delivers the highest quality online video stream with instant start up times to any Internet connection speed with minimal buffering, stuttering or dropped frames. The platform dynamically detects local bandwidth and CPU conditions and seamlessly switches, in near real time, the video quality of content that a player receives. Smooth Streaming scales to support a full range of content distribution applications, from lower bandwidth mobile connections to very high bandwidth Internet connections.

Microsoft Silverlight DRM powered by PlayReady, enables secure, encrypted delivery of high value content from the headend to a consumer’s playback device. Unlike stream encryption technologies, Silverlight DRM protects the actual content inside a secure encrypted wrapper to ensure that content is used only as intended by the content owner. This level of protection makes it possible for service providers to deliver premium content safely to subscribers over any public HTTP network. Microsoft deploys Silverlight DRM by enabling key third party DRM licensees such as BuyDRM, an Austin TX based Silverlight DRM rights management and solutions provider, which offers a complete and secure solution to customers.

NAB Demonstration
At NAB 2009, Envivio and BuyDRM will demonstrate the world’s first end-to-end, fully protected content delivery system using IIS Live Smooth Streaming and Silverlight DRM. Live streams will be captured by the Envivio 4Caster C4 and encoded into the numerous VC-1 profiles of different bit rates required for IIS Smooth Streaming. The output profiles will then be encrypted using PlayReady with an encryption key managed via BuyDRM’s KeyOS platform. The encrypted content will be delivered using IIS Smooth Streaming technology to a Silverlight PC client, which will request the decryption key from the KeyOS platform and then decrypt the video and audio content for playback.

Envivio 4Caster C4
The Envivio 4Caster C4 convergence encoder is the world’s first to provide video compression for all Three Screens of consumer video – TVs, PCs and mobile devices – on a single platform. The 4Caster C4 enables network operators to take multiple channels of content and encode them for mobile TV, Internet TV, and SD and HD IPTV delivery using just one platform. The unique combination of a high-availability hardware appliance with an embedded software encoding core enables the feature set and performance of the C4 to evolve and keep pace with the constantly changing needs of service providers.

“Subscribers’ quality of experience is the common denominator that separates successful IP video services from the pack,” said Julien Signès, President and CEO of Envivio. “Envivio designed flexibility into its encoding platform specifically to allow evolution over time. Enhanced encoding implementations and valuable new technologies such as IIS Smooth Streaming and Silverlight DRM can be added to our encoders via software upgrades, enabling operators to keep their services optimized so they can continue to attract and retain the maximum number of subscribers.”

The Envivio and BuyDRM demonstration of IIS Live Smooth Streaming with Silverlight DRM will be on display at the Envivio stand at NAB - Booth SU2424. It will also be on display at the Microsoft stand - Booth SL720.