DTCP is a link protection technology that is seeing a tremendous surge in adoption. A principle reason for this is that back in May of this year the cable industry, led by Comcast, Cox, Time Warner Cable and CableLabs, annouced support for a new DLNA publication called the Commercial Video Profile (DLNA-CVP). This profile addresses the movement of commercial video content, the kind that needs copy protection, around a home network. DLNA-CVP requires the use of DTCP as the content protection technology to use when someone streams a movie from their cable set top box to their connected TV. As a result, expect to see a lot more DTCP enabled set top boxes, TVs and other DLNA-CVP certified devices to come into the market at an ever increasing rate.

While this news focuses on watching movies from a set top box, there is a nascent use case out there, enabled by DTCP but requiring an additional piece of technology. This use case is coming into increasing demand, as tablets and other portable devices proliferate. The use case I’m talking about is that of building a library of movies and TV shows and selectively taking them with you when you leave your home to watch on the road. You see, DTCP does support this use case, as far as protecting the link between your set top box and a networked storage device. However, to actually copy the movie into a home library and move it to your tablet to watch it on the road, in a completely legitimate manner no less, requires another technology called DRM.

This “build a library, take it on the road” feature is completely legitimate, provided the movie coming over the network via DTCP is imported into a file that is protected by a DRM. Not all DRMs can be used for this purpose. The licensor of DTCP, an organization known as DTLA, painstakingly evaluates and selectively authorizes only certain DRMs to be used in this manner. The exciting news in all this is that shortly before the announcement about the cable industry’s enthusiastic endorsement of DLNA-CVP, the DTCP licensors announced that the Marlin DRM is “authorized” for use in copying and storeing a movie as it streams across the home network protected by DTCP.

This is tremendously good news for people who want to collect and organize their movies and TV shows whereever they came from – Internet download, Internet streaming, or from the cable service provider. Think of the convenience of collecting movies and having each one exactly where you put it and available to watch on your TV or to move to your tablet and watch “on the go”. Marlin enables all these use cases, and with tens of millions of Marlin devices in people’s homes already, with many more coming, this consumer utopia is one step closer to reality.