What’s the Widevine CLS?
Widevine’s CLS is a free Google-hosted option available to Widevine licensees to generate DRM licenses. This service endpoint allows content distributors to use Google’s infrastructure rather than fully operating their own Widevine licensing server or working with a third-party DRM vendor. For some, this has been a convenient entry point – but it comes with trade-offs: as a free offering, support and valuable features aren’t available.
Alternatively, Google also offers licensees a “Widevine License Server SDK” to execute 100% of the end-to-end DRM license generation/delivery on their own infrastructure – avoiding any need for communicating with the Widevine CLS. Many third-party cloud multi-DRM providers already use this SDK – which also allows them to offer improved service-level and benefits.
For example, these are benefit differences between using the Widevine CLS vs. a managed DRM provider like DRMtoday that has the Widevine License Server SDK in place: