According to Cisco, mobile video traffic (at 51%) exceeded voice and traffic for the first time during 2012. By 2017 it is expected to be 66%. Already, 25% of all YouTube video downloads are to a mobile device – and according to Google, HD dominates.
There are just two flies in the ointment. Film producers have been reluctant to make thier latest HD blockbusters available on mobile because of the ease with which they can be pirated (especially on open Android systems); and secondly, the high processing/bandwidth demands of HD detract from the HD experience on anything other than high-end devices.
Furthermore, there is a shift toward low- and mid-range devices that could impact on HD video growth. "Low- and mid-range devices are expected to power growth in smartphone sales as interest in high-end devices falters and the focus shifts to more price-sensitive markets such as China and Brazil," reports the Financial Times, noting that those very areas tend to have high rates of piracy. "Sales of entry-level and mid-range models are expected to dwarf those of high-end models by 2015, according to Arm and Gartner."
Now ARM believes that it has the solution for HD video on mid-range devices: a new Cortex A12 CPU to give phones high-end power at mid-range prices; and the new Mali-V500 video chip. The latter was developed following discussions with content distributors and Hollywood studios. It uses ARM's TrustZone technology to securely decode the video stream on receipt.
“Previous [DRM] solutions have been about securing the keys to the content. This is about securing the content itself,” ARM's director of market development Chris Porthouse told the FT.
"The Mali-V500 is optimized for silicon re-use by a variety of codecs, across encode and decode functionality, delivering multi-standard HD and 4K encode and decode in an incredibly small area with half the system power and memory bandwidth of competing solutions," he explained in more detail in a blog post yesterday.
TorrentFreak is unsurprisingly less enthusiastic. "So if it’s up to ARM your smartphone will soon be shipped with built-in DRM to keep pirates at bay. The question is, however, whether all this expensive technology will be effective in preventing movies from leaking out. Or will it mostly cause trouble for legitimate consumers, as is often the case with other forms of DRM."
But Porthouse told Infosecurity, "To be clear, Mali-V500 is not DRM. Mali-V500 helps make secure systems with DRM far more efficient and user friendly – making the content you paid for easily available across all your personal devices.
"Hardware backed security will make it harder for pirates to rip off digital content, which will encourage the content owners to deploy their highest value content on such devices. Conversely, if it is trivial to rip content from a device, then content owners are less likely to allow their highest value content to run on that device."
Either way, he added, "Mali-V500 will support devices that don’t want DRM and content that does not have DRM."