Story

Ever since its inception more than a century ago (1895), Gibson has always committed itself to providing nothing less than the best, when it comes to music. Their first electric guitar prototype in 1935, and its consequent release on May 20, 1936 (ES-150) marked a new era of innovation in the music industry.

Keeping their heritage of ‘leading the change’, Gibson intended to create a solution that would ensure media compliance and restrict media piracy to an extent that its effect on industry economics would become negligible. They also wanted to ensure that loyal consumers would not have to bear the brunt of this new concept, and that the sophisticated technology required to implement this cause would not have a negative effect on media productions in turn.

Instead of dictating a next to impossible media solution that would need half the US fiscal budget, Ephlux with its partner met the challenge with a revolutionary approach.

Challenges

Instead of proposing a tech jargon filled encryption module with a server farm the likes of Google to back it up – Ephlux and its partner developed a user friendly media application – rightly termed ‘Playfriend’.

Playfriend is a device independent software, allowing consumers to transfer their media seamlessly to any media device; stand alone, portable or otherwise. This ensures centralization of all public media via a singular, top of the line user interface.

To ensure zero media piracy, ‘digital watermark licensing’ was utilized. Each instance of any media action implied a watermark verification routine, be it a scenario where a user plays a song on a device, or an extensive transfer of all media files from one device to another. All media actions would require digital watermark validation; similarly all media transfer would entail watermark generation and logging via centralized servers in a cost effective and efficient manner.

Accomplishing this challenge was by no means an easy task. The first of its kind, Playfriend would revolutionize the media industry, so it had to ‘walk the talk’.  

Solution

After a strong analysis and technology road-map was agreed, Ephlux with its partner presented the customer with multiple design concepts for the front-end application. After multiple iterations and feedback from the customer, a design concept which best mapped with the intended brand personality was finalized.

After finalizing the design theme, the hybrid team (Ephlux and its partner) developed the new application using SOA methods, while keeping the customer in a close loop by releasing frequent intermediate application builds available for customer feedback. The feedbacks were promptly incorporated back into the application design.

Server end protocols, architecture and Web Services were integrated via RWCS (UK), while digital watermark embedding, web services interfacing and application development was handled completely by Ephlux.

After the application was thoroughly tested and user-accepted, it was moved on to the server infrastructure for the Proof-of-Concept (POC) release and was presented by Gibson in the International CES 2008, the world’s largest consumer technology tradeshow.

Playfriend is a milestone and one of the key benchmarks in the endeavors of bringing the media industry one step closer towards ‘bulletproof’ licensing and elimination of piracy.

The project was a success owing to the spirit of teamwork between companies that belonged to different industry spheres and geographies, but shared common values; a commitment of accomplishing nothing less than the best, and the desire to be the leaders of change!