A H.264 SVC distributed content protection system with flexible key stream generation

Modern scalable coding techniques, as H264 SVC, are adequate to save processing power and bandwidth. Moreover, if the enhancements of a SVC encoded content are protected, it is possible to enable pay-per-quality systems. Transcoding and protection entail huge doses of processing power at provider side and should be distributed. Moreover, processing key streams to decrypt enhancements that were encrypted separately can increase the complexity at receiver side. This abstract describes a distributed system for content encoding and protection that generates a flexible key stream that simplifies the receiver.