Selling video online in a digital format poses numerous challenges for filmmakers and content owners. In addition to an eCommerce platform and a method to collect online payments, you may need streaming server hosting in order to stream the content, and great considerations need to be made as to how to protect the content from digital piracy.

The preferred method of preventing piracy of digital media today is Digital Rights Management (DRM). DRM enables a content owner to prevent unauthorized access and distribution of digital content by encrypting the content so that it can never be played UNLESS someone first purchases a license from you.

In addition to preventing piracy of digital audio and video, DRM enables a content owner to create rules that determine how and where the media can be played so videos can be sold on a pay-per-play, pay-per-day, or unlimited plays basis giving the owner new ways to sell and market their videos.

DRM is used by iTunes, Walmart Music, Sony Music, Napster, Rhapsody, Urge, and virtually all of the top online media companies, but until recently has been too complicated or too expensive for smaller businesses to effectively implement.

The services that exist today either: (1) provide the piece-parts and leave it up to you to put it all together, (2) charge exorbitant sums of money to build it all for you, or (3) you don't even own the store so you don't have ultimate control over the content and marketing.

Well, here comes Digital Rights Director…

For less than $100/month Digital Rights Director has a service that lets content owners sell videos and audios online from their OWN web stores with DRM protection built in to the service. Best of all, there's absolutely nothing technical involved so even a novice computer user can be selling videos online in a matter of minutes with no set-up fees, consultants or "web guy".

The Digital Rights Director Online Media Store is built on a robust eCommerce platform that supports multiple languages and currencies and has built-in promotional tools like a Newsletter Manager and Affiliate Program.

Everything thing configures in a matter of minutes using a web-based Administration Panel that consists of just a few simple web forms. With these forms you can effectively customize your store, set-up your method of collecting payments, and create categories and subcategories to index your videos.

You can also easily create media rules that determine exactly how the file can be played and used, although many media rules are already created for you as part of the service. For example you can have rules for 1-play, 5-play and unlimited play versions; and/or you can create a 1-day, 1-week, or 1-month play options as well as unlimited plays versions.

You can also enable or disable options like the ability to copy to a disk, transfer to a portable device, or backup and restore; and, if you're going to enable those options, you can specify how many times the file can be copied, transferred or backed up and restored.

Once you upload your video, you simply check the media rule options you want to apply and the prices you want to charge for each of those options and the video is instantly available for purchase in your own online store.

Anyone who purchases a license from your store can play the video (as long as his license hasn't expired!). Anyone without a valid license, or with an expired license will be unable to play the video and instead will receive a link taking them back to the EXACT page in your store to purchase the license for that specific video.

In addition to eliminating all the costs of duplication, artwork, packing, shipping and returns associated with mailing CDs, DVDs or VHS tapes; the service also allows you to sell more videos by offering immediate availability (which also greatly increases international orders!) and it opens new marketing opportunities by giving you more ways to sell your videos.

The price of Digital Rights Director's Online Media Store service is $99.95/month with an unconditional 100% money-back guarantee in the first 30-days, and you can cancel any time after that. If you don't already have a domain name you can use, they can register one for you for only $11/year.

Everything else is basically included in the price of the service including all the DRM packaging, DRM licensing, streaming server hosting account, eCommerce shopping cart, and built-in affiliate program.

You can view a short video demonstration of Digital Rights Director's Online Media Store, or you can visit Digital Rights Director and ask them to set you up with a live demonstration so you can see how the entire service works.

The guys at Digital Rights Director also own Digital Video Host which means they have tons of experience in delivering web-based audio and video and also offer a full line of streaming hosting and live web broadcasting solutions.

Digital Rights Director is by far the easiest DRM solution available on the market today, the fastest to implement, and in fact, the only DRM service that's specifically intended for smaller businesses.