Setting up an account with a license provider

A license provider must issue the licenses for the content that you protect. You must set up an account with a license provider that supports Windows Media Encoder 9 Series. As part of setting up the account, the license provider will prompt you to select the rights you want to include in your licenses. Depending on the license server, you might be prompted to specify other settings, such as how you want to issue licenses.

After you have set up an account, the license provider creates a DRM profile and saves it to your local computer. Then, you can use the profile to protect your content. The profile contains the following information:

• A DRM profile ID
• A name and description
• Attributes (name-value pairs)
• The URL to the license provider's Web site
• The license acquisition URLs

  Players can support different versions of Microsoft DRM technology: Windows Media Rights Manager version 1 or 7. Therefore, different license acquisition URLs are used that correspond to each version. Each license acquisition URL points to the page on the license provider's Web site where a license can be acquired and is included in the header of your protected content. When the user plays the protected content, the player opens the appropriate license acquisition URL to get a license. 

When a DRM profile is created, the following values are also created and stored on your local computer:

• Public and private signing keys. The license provider requires the public signing key to issue licenses. The private signing key is not returned.
• A license key seed. For each file or stream you want to protect, the seed is used to generate a key to encrypt the content. This value is also used by the license provider to regenerate this key and include it in a license, which is used by the user's player to decrypt the content.

Related topics

• Using digital rights management to protect content
• To set up an account with a license provider