Security of digital entertainment content from creation to consumption

With the advent of digital technologies, many new market opportunities have emerged for content owners, content distributors, and consumer electronics/information technology industries. An essential requirement for developing a thriving marketplace is the protection of copyrighted content in digital form. There are four major stages in the delivery of content to the consumer: (1) capturing on digital media, (2) packaging, (3) distribution to home networks, and (4) transfer to the final audio/visual device within the home network. Entertainment content is of particular importance as it will be in high demand for many years to come. If an end-to-end security cannot be provided in a digital market, there would be no incentive for content creation. Lack of new supplies would result in detrimental effects for all the industries involved in the delivery chain. In this paper, we present the primary means of securing the entertainment content from creation to consumption in an attempt to understand the overall complexity of the problem.