All the talk lately regarding DRM is how to prevent video from being distributed via third party P2P networks, such as Gnutella, Fasttrack or external BitTorrent networks. The rationale being that those reached by these third party P2P networks are lost customers. But wait, who ever said they were lost customers? What if those lost customers were instead gained customers? What if instead of third party P2P networks being a threat to our business models they were a compliment?
Okay, you have a video file, no DRM, with timed pointers to URLs of advertisement and payment services. When you load the video file, your media player connects to those pointed URLs and either gets back advertising or causes an account to be charged for premium service or something, using simple stuff like cookies and user authentication. If it gets back advertising, your client automatically plays the ads as specified by the timed pointers. If it causes your account to be charged, you don’t see the advertisements. The ads (or lack thereof) can be cached by your media player for a given period of time, and can be updated as needed.
Sure, you could just override the pointers to cheat the system, but if the ads were good enough or the premium service was cheap enough, you might just be inclined to leave it be.
Just as web pages point to external images, so can video files point to external ads or whatnot. Hypervideo, anyone?