A new idea for a video distribution platform called L3, by Pune’s Prof. Anil Gupte, has won the “best Customer-centric New Idea” award in the Wipro-Wharton Innovation Tournament, 2011.
Here is a video of Anil Gupte giving an overview of L3:
If you don’t see a video above, click here to see it on YouTube
L3 has received multiple awards this year, including:
- Selected as on of the top 5 finalists in the Economic Times Power of Ideas Competition conducted by the Center for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), IIM Ahmedabad. CIIE along with Dr. Narayan Murthy extended Seed Funding to this venture.
- Selected as one of the Category Winner at the DST-Lockheed Martin India Innovation Growth Program.
- Selected as one of the Red Herring Global 100 (Innovative ideas and ventures).
- Winner of the Wipro-Wharton Global Innovation Challenge in the category of New Consumer-Centric Innovations, felicitated at the Wharton campus.
Prof. Gupte is part of the senior management team at Amplify Mindware, a group of educational institutions that are part of the Bharati Vidyapeeth family.
This sounds interesting, but it isn’t the first time that someone is touting a new “copy protection” technology. The rest of it (distribution, monetization, differential payment etc.) is all dependent on the copy protection working as intended.
Whatever this new technique is, it should be published for peer review (especially now that it has been patented, apparently). What’s to prevent someone from developing a ‘media player’ that pays up once, decodes the content, and creates a copy for further distribution? What’s to prevent a user from sharing his decryption keys with others?
Also, does this operate on a pay-per-view basis? That wouldn’t make for the greatest user experience. On the other hand, a pay-once-to-buy model would mean that the user would get a decrypted copy of the media, which could be easily shared.
It’s possible of course that Prof. Gupte et al. have worked on these problems. Would be nice to read about their solutions…