Samsung Smart TV, PlayDRM and HLS

Question

We use in our applications for Samsung Smart TVs either the Apple HLS or progressive download for getting/playing the video. We would like to move to the DRM protected content and we saw in the SDK documentation that the PlayReady DRM is supported Samsung Smart TVs.

What we do not understand is what kind of protocol we can use? Does the PlayReady DRM on 2011 and 2012 models (SDK 2.5 and 3.0) support only Microsoft Smooth Streaming or it is compatible also with the Apple HLS?

What kind of streaming protocol we need to use in order to be able to protect the content by DRM Samsung Smart TVs?

Any information, experiences are highly appreciated.

Answer 1

Typically (but there are exceptions) HLS does not support PlayReady, so the (by far) most likely protocol on the Samsung 3.0 SDK to support PlayReady is ASF, i.e. progressive-downloaded WMV streams.

However, the 3.0 SDK also supports MPEG-DASH and the HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) protocol. MPEG-DASH, per se, does allow for PlayReady protection of A/V payloads. However, I do not know the Samsung SDK enough to say whether this is supported.