ADORA - Creating, Protecting and Delivering Digital Products

The ADORA platform serves as a rights management platform for the online distribution of digital content that require protection that enforces restrictions for legitimate usage only, e.g. full length music content or movies. The platform consists of the following functional entities.

Rights Locker

The rights locker administers all rights that have been purchased by actual end users. This allows users to later acquire new licenses for the purchased products – up to the limit specified in the contract – whenever they switch to a new device (computer or mobile handset) and the DRM protection denies access to the content. The list of acquired rights can be examined in order for the user to check the content he/she acquired so far.

The operator of the ADORA platform can use the rights locker for customer care functionality, as its call center can verify the actually used rights in order to device whether it should grant additional licenses to the user.

DRM Abstraction Layer

ADORA implements an abstraction layer for quick and easy integration of new DRM technologies. This interface also allows the offering of the same content using different DRMs and/or formats, e.g. Microsoft DRM for PC delivery and SDC DRM for mobile handsets. The actually used DRM can be specified for every license requests. The user can hereby choose whether he/she wants to use all available license requests for a single device or spread them over several devices using different DRM technologies. Additionally, depending on the applied business model, the license can be issued unlimited or bound to a specific subscription that will cease to work in the future at a well defined deadline.

Content Management System

ADORA offers a content management system that is tuned to fast processing of new and/or updated information received daily/hourly by the content providers (music labels, film studios, .). New content can be either directly injected by the providers using an ADORA API, can be ingested based on an XML format as specified by ADORA, or are imported using ADORA's own content injection mechanism (available for major labels). ADORA is also able to handle the same items in different formats, e.g. a music track as WMA and as AAC+ file and it also supports on-the-fly conversions to further formats, e.g. AAC+ ADTS format to MP4. ADORA is explicitly designed to life in a heterogeneous environment.

As a generic platform, ADORA is focusing on tasks that are valid for all content types. However, ADORA supports some content specific tasks as on-the-fly conversion or automatic generation of prelistenings based on a automatic sound analysis.

An additional part of the CMS system is the storage of the rights/prices as granted by the content owners, e.g. wholesale price 0.50 cents or 5 burns to a CD. These settings are defined by the contracts with the content owners and can be administered using ADORA's administration interface (Adora Control Center ACC). ADORA ensures that these rules are enforced at all times.

Reporting

ADORA offers advanced reporting functionality for revenue share reports, label reports as well as reports for societies, e.g. collecting societies (royalty groups) or chart societies.

ADORA logical diagramm