31 CastLabs ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE
YOU CAN STREAM VIDEO CONTENT IN YOURWEB BROWSER OR APP. IT’S REALLY ANOTT STREAMINGMODEL
onboard entertainment server and enjoy protected content on their own devices, without needing to pre-install an app. ADVANCED ADVERTISING A cloud-based delivery workflow not only improves the passenger experience, but creates a larger potential audience for the airline’s advertising activities and ancillary revenue opportunities. Childers explains the current paradigm for ad delivery on aircrafts: “When it operates outside the cloud, it is founded on a 30-day exhibition cycle and a 45- 60-day content delivery cycle, which is not consistent with just-in-time advertising. Airlines will tell you what great demographics they have, they will talk about the professions and incomes of their passengers, but after these metrics, advertisers still don’t know what content the ad was seen against.” The tools castLabs provides will allow advertising technology to move into the same ecosystem that IFE is moving into. It will accommodate programmatic advertising buyers, airlines will be able to collect data to target ads and report back the content it was seen against, and it will allow advertisers to buy particular audience segments. Stattman reminds us to think of OTT technology again: “It’s exactly the same thing: as soon as the aircraft has an internet connection, you have the ability to get data from the aircraft and upload data, and the cloud-based workflow we’re offering means you can do this anywhere on the planet at any time.” Childers adds: “In essence, this new approach to advertising makes us part of the digital out-of-home advertising space and the digital-placed advertising space – you can combine environmental data with personal data to target an ad.” The integration of DRMtoday into BoardConnect is the first holistic system that enables IFE in the cloud and it will become de facto standard for other entertainment solution providers.
In response, the APEX Technology Committee codified the first digital delivery standard for IFE in 1995, enabling the creation of one deliverable standard of content for use across all platforms, with a uniform level of security. CLOUDBUSTING As film turned to digital and different encoding methodologies developed, APEX realised it would need to be part of a larger ecosystem to stay up to date. It began working with the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), which established a set of standards for the digital distribution of Hollywood content – and began to architect a path out of physical media delivery and into the cloud, for which castLabs offered the solution. castLabs provides the video playback technology and content protection technology for IFE systems that enable the ‘bring your own device’ model. “You can connect through Wi-Fi in an aircraft on your mobile, tablet or laptop and stream video content in your web browser or app. It’s really an OTT streaming model,” says Michael Stattmann, CEO at castLabs. castLabs has been a part of the DECE since its conception, and Hollywood studios have confidence in its ability to create economies for scaling content, so it doesn’t need to be recreated by every participant. “When a studio produces a movie, it is delivered to many services in unique formats, and every service is creating its own streaming format out of that and doing its own content protection,” says Stattmann. “The distribution chain is inefficient and everyone is trying to fix it. The studios are interested, because they have no quality control over the content.” Studios are giving out raw source file content to intermediaries, which may get lost, leak and become pirated, or it may get technically trashed and lose appeal. “It means every airline is paying a high price to get the same content, because it’s
all made individually for each airline,” says Stattmann. “In 2019, there’s no reason the same movie should be digitally duplicated.” castLabs is helping airlines shift from traditional systems to more OTT-like ones and, by doing this, it is leveraging the opportunity to consolidate content into a singular format. Stattmann explains: "It’s a unique time to shift content delivery into the model of economies where you do things once; where you do the quality control once and where you switch out visible watermarks so you’re not annoying or destroying the picture in any way.” THE TECHNOLOGY The solution castLabs is offering is used in Lufthansa Systems’ BoardConnect IFE system. It works by deploying a DRM server aboard an aircraft and player apps (which play back the content) on passengers’ devices. Its DRM server is marketed under the brand name DRMtoday and consists of two offerings: cloud-based and Onboard. The DRMtoday Onboard offering is a multi-DRM solution like what we would see in the cloud, but it has the caveat that it’s built to work autonomously, so without an internet connection. This means it provides all the licence capabilities needed to reach all types of passenger devices. With this solution and the industry adoption of the Common Media Application Format (CMAF), it is becoming a reality that airlines can store only one file per piece of content they need. “In order to play the content – the other piece of the puzzle – you need to encode it and protect it in a way so it can be distributed in an aircraft environment. Content protection starts with encryption, where the content keys are originally generated, to where they go into DRMtoday,” says Stattman. The DRMtoday integration with BoardConnect will allow passengers to connect to the aircraft’s Wi-Fi to access the
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