Last Friday, Google acquired Widevine for an unknown sum . Widevine is one of the many DRM technology vendors. Widevine was the first company to coin the concept of Virtual Smart Card, which was just a tamper resistant based software.

Clearly, Google is moving in the direction to deliver copyrighted content. Several security-related clues show that:

• Google announced an initiative for faster action on copyright infringement on YouTube.
• Yesterday, Google has relaxed the limitations of 15mn for the clips uploaded on YouTube. This limitation was to satisfy the content owners. It was expected that having the movie in slices would be a deterrent. Google announced that their proprietary fingerprinting tool Content ID was becoming better and better. Thus, they were confident to spot illegal content on upload link.
• Widevine provides Google with a DRM technology, approved by studios, for the delivery of movie. Furthermore, Widevine is one of the DRM technologies approved by UltraViolet (aka DECE). The other approved DRMs are Adobe Flash Access, Marlin, Microsoft PlayReady, and OMA.
  It was wiser to purchase an approved technology rather than build their own because it already got the studios’ blessing.

All these hints show that Google attempts to be nice to content owners. The next NetFlix?