WorldWide Digital Rights Management Market, Industry / Sector Analysis Report, Regional Outlook & Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2019 - 2025 (Includes Business Impact of COVID-19)

                                          
Digital Rights Management (DRM) Market size is growing rapidly due to an upsurge in the number of online piracy incidents across the web platforms. The ubiquitous internet is reaching a wide customer base and is making large monetary benefits which has spurred the Intellectual Property (IP) holders to share their content online. However, a surge in plagiarism will lead to a loss of their financial benefits. The integration of such technology with their intellectual property enables them to stop illegal activities and assist them in expanding their business. Further, the adoption of social networking sites has allowed the business to advertise and sell their products online across the globe at a profitable price. Moreover, the adoption of the content marketing strategy enabled the business to increase its audience engagement by delivering high-quality content to their users across the social media platforms.
 

The DRM technology is used to restrict the illegal distribution of the content over the internet and protect the digital content such as media files and software from intruders. The technology is being widely used by the publishers, media & entertainment companies, and manufacturers to avoid copyright infringement activities to maintain the integrity of the data. Moreover, the adoption of such technologies enables the publisher to limit the piracy activities by embedding the code into the original content. The technology encompasses four key fragments named content provider, server provider, license provider, and user. 
 

Several government regulations improve internal and external compliance, restricting third-party users to encroach into the content offered by the publishers. For instance, United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act and European Unions’ Copyright Directive allow the IP owners to criminalize the intruders if phishing activity has been found in the original data.
 

The surge in advocacy groups such as Entertainment Consumer Association (ECA), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and European Digital Rights (EDR) that look after the protection of digital contents is also anticipated to fuel the market. The Copyright Directive (Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament) is a directive of the European Union passed to implement copyright laws across Europe under the provision of the Treaty of Rome. The presence of such associations and government regulations enabled the publishers to distribute legitimate and high-end content among their end users without any concerns about pirating activities.
 

However, the lack of awareness toward the benefits of DRM technologies is projected to hinder the growth over the forecast timeline. Most of the technology companies are still unaware about the availability of the digital technologies in the market, helping them to strengthen their market growth. In addition, the absence of common standards for the protection of digital rights leads to a high complexity in organizations, such as the British Library, which allows their customers to copy the content with the copyright permits.
 

DRM technologies allow the publishers to protect the premium content from hackers to make any modifications in the file. For instance, Apple integrated the technology into their iTunes Music Store by limiting the number of devices on which the media can be played on.  
 

North America dominates the DRM market due to the presence of major key players in this region. Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe Systems are expected to have a major market share in the region. The key players of the market opt for investments in R&D activities to strengthen their presence in the region. Microsoft has invested USD 500 million in the market to stop the music piracy across the region. Other prominent key players, such as Adobe and Amazon, have also engineered custom technologies to gain the market share in this region.   
 

Europe is anticipated to witness a substantial growth rate due to several projects that are undertaken by the key players to propel their market share in the region. The rise in the presence of startup companies offering innovative solutions is anticipated to drive the growth of the market. In June 2018, Safeguard Secure PDF Web Viewer installed version 1.1.1 into Locklizard data to increase the viewing speed and support the complex Portable Document File (PDF) documents.
 

Asia Pacific is projected to witness the fastest growth rate due to the increase in the number of investments done by the leading vendors in this region. Several projects undertaken by the government to counter the theft of original data are anticipated to drive the market during the forecast period. For instance, in May 2018, iQIYI launched a self-developed platform to boost the demand for the content protection management across their solutions. The company received the approval from China’s most prestigious organization named ChinaDRM Lab to monitor pirating activities in real-time.  
 

The DRM market is fragmented due to the presence of a significant number of players in the market. Some of the key players operating in this market are Apple, Inc., Adobe Systems, EMC Corporation, Oracle Corporation, RealNetworks, Inc., Sony Corporation, Verisign, Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Locklizard Limited, OpenText Corp., Vitrium Systems, Inc., Hewlett-Packard, and IBM Corporation. The key players of the market opt for product development and investments in SMEs to obtain an inorganic growth in this market. For instance, Apple’s platform has installed FairPlay technology across its iOS devices to encrypt the MP4 multimedia file into Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) file to protect the content distributed through iTunes music store. FairPlay technology was originally developed by Veridisc designed to encrypt the content by using HTTP live streaming to avoid any intrusion in the data.