M+E Connections

As distribution has taken the ultimate leap to cloud-native infrastructures serving multi-screen environments, over-the-top (OTT) platform providers have started placing a high priority on end-to-end safeguarding of the media and entertainment (M&E) industry’s $230 billion-plus content investment.

The pandemic created a “great opportunity” in the streaming video sector, according to Goutham Vinjamuri, COO at Toronto, Canada-based Firstlight Media, a cloud solutions provider, spun off from AT&T in 2020, whose cloud-native platform helps companies deliver premium, personalized streaming video to any screen.

Firstlight provides video streaming companies with a cloud service “agnostic,” Kubernetes-based solution, he said June 14, during the session “OTT Infrastructure Security: An End-to-End Proposition” at the online 2022 Video Security Summit.

During the session, Vinjamuri discussed current video streaming strategies, including digital rights management (DRM) and app security, as well as new opportunities that protect content at each point in the distribution chain.

Firstlight has addressed some of the “concerns around security, scalability and many other things,” he said, noting it provides an “end-to-end solution” from video ingest to video management to video distribution.

“We have our own in-house components [and] we don’t use any third parties,” he told viewers, noting the company built its in-house solutions on Google Cloud and other cloud platforms, although it is “seeing a lot of traction” now with media workloads being moved into Google Cloud specifically.

“One of the things that I think is really important for people to understand about video infrastructure is that it is way more important to build security in as you build that infrastructure,” according to Colin Dixon, founder and chief analyst at nScreenMedia.

“I know that that’s something that you’ve been really focused on at Firstlight,” Dixon told Vinjamuri.

Vinjamuri agreed that it “cannot be a post factor scenario where we address security when we hit the problem.”

Firstlight had been thinking about the issues “very proactively and making sure that security is a practice which we wanted to have as part of the overall architecture and development life cycle itself,” Vinjamuri explained.

“So when we talk about introducing that as a discipline, it gives a lot of focus [and] attention and, more importantly,” helps to identify “up front” any “holes” and resolve them before going into production, he said.

Three Key Areas of Focus

Firstlight thought about security in “three dimensions,” according to Vinjamuri. “One is the application dimension, which is where the users will interact and connect to the application to access the content,” he noted.

“The second one is your infrastructure, where the application gets hosted. So what are the measures that you have to take care of on the infrastructure side before a solution is deployed into production.”

Last, the third dimension is the one he said is the “most critical” and is the content dimension, adding: “You cannot afford to have content getting pirated [and] our content getting manipulated or accessed by these pirates.”

So that is “how we address application infrastructure and content security: together. They cannot be isolated even. They go hand in glove with each other,” according to Vinjamuri.

The event was presented by Piracy Monitor and nScreenMedia, produced by MESA, with sponsorship by Akamai, Verimatrix, FriendMTS, and Intertrust ExpressPlay, and was held in association with the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA).