A quality adaptable multilayer video content protection scheme

With the growing popularity of the Internet, more and more contents providers are shifting their focus from the theater to the network users. In order to protect the copyright, DRM system is applied to encrypt the films to prevent them from being illegally downloaded and replayed. To motivate subscribers to buy the high quality encrypted video content, trailers are usually produced in a variety of media. However, producing two kinds of films not only spends extra time and storage space but also increases the cost of production. In this paper, we propose a new solution to solve this problem which splits a film into two layers: a preview layer with low quality content and a protected layer which can be recovered to retrieve the entire video data. In such a way, the preview layer could be used to attract users to buy the content and the protected layer protected by the DRM system is used to recover the original resolution. Especially, to facilitate the proposed scheme, the quality of the content is adjustable according to the application environment.