Irdeto proposes a way to blunt live sports license storms
Irdeto proposes a method to optimize key rotation for scalable live sports streaming by mitigating "license storms" during high-audience events. Their approach, called High-Frequency Key Cycling, provides current and future encryption keys in the same license response and staggers subsequent requests using device groups or shards.
Key Takeaways
- License storms can occur when encryption keys refresh and many devices request the next key within seconds of playback.
- Irdeto Control’s High-Frequency Key Cycling uses two mechanisms: current and future keys in the same license response, plus staggered requests across device groups or shards.
- Irdeto says the model is meant to support shorter rotation intervals without scaling DRM endpoint infrastructure for every rotation event.
- The approach is designed to fit existing standards and streaming workflows, with low-friction deployment and minimal changes to packagers and players.
Why It Matters
The immediate issue is operational: frequent key rotation can improve protection, but it also concentrates license traffic at crypto-period boundaries during live sports. Irdeto’s proposal tries to spread that demand by changing both how often devices request keys and when they request them. The broader significance is that content protection and infrastructure scaling are being treated as one problem, not two. That matters for operators running high-audience events where license traffic can spike into the hundreds of thousands or millions. What to watch next: whether Irdeto shows this working in deployments beyond the blog’s 1,000,000-viewer, 10-minute crypto-period example.
Read full article at irdeto.dsmn8.com
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