Sky Broadband DRM Woes Halt Films

Sky Broadband DRM Woes Halt Films Sky has hit the pause button on delivering films (known by some as movies) and sport via their Sky By Broadband service, due to cracks in Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM software.

Sky has put an announcement on their site,

In order to make an essential update to the Sky by broadband security system, we are sorry that access to all movies and some sports content has been temporarily suspended. This does not affect your computer and content can still be bookmarked for future use. We will keep you posted on progress and apologise for any inconvenience.

Clearly being a big bash for the service, it must be of great embarrassment for all concerned. Content owners from around the world - especially those within the News International family, Fox, etc - will be throwing a dizzy fit, having bought the technologies companies long-lasting pitch that DRM is essential for the survival of the content biz. You see, most of them feel their clients are not to be trusted with the content,that they’re so used to having.

Sky Broadband DRM Woes Halt Films Background
A couple of weeks ago, a little software app called FreeUse4WM appeared, that stripped the Digital Rights Management (DRM) from any content, be that audio or video, held in the Windows Media format.

Following this, Microsoft threw people at fixing the problems - they had to, as it laid bare all of the content that it was supposed to protect. Sitting back with a smug look on their faces (we imagine), they must have choked on their latte’s when version 1.2 of FreeUse4WM came out, cracking the DRM and exposing the content again. It’s understood that Microsoft are working on the fix for v1.2.

Security of all sorts is just a game of cat and mouse, with no absolute guarantees - security company created protection

On this day, years gone by ...

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One Response to “Sky Broadband DRM Woes Halt Films”

on 24 Jan 2007 at 4:30 pm 1Sky Anytime: One Million Films In A Year at Digital-Lifestyles (alpha remix) GERMANY

[…] Figures for the film downloads could have been larger if Sky hadn’t had to pull the service back in September after their chosen DRM-restriction system, by Microsoft, was cracked. […]