Questions about Microsoft DRM

And what about WSD?

[LABachlr]

I have a client who wants to incorporate a pay-per-view section on his website for his production company. He has 3 short films and a feature film that he would like to distribute via his website instead of going through the offline channels.

I was told by some designers that Microsoft DRM is the encoding format of choice for this type of setup.

Here are my questions:

1. Which program is best to use to encode the videos for DRM? Will Adobe Premiere work? If so, is Premiere Pro the only version of Premiere that will have this encoding, or does Premiere 6.0 have it as well?

2. If Premiere won't work, which program will be needed?

3. What about the people who use Mac's and don't know or don't want to download WMP for Mac? Is there a similar technology for Quicktime? If so, what is it and what are the costs for that?

4. What are the costs involved in having this type of technology on a website?

5. Will the client need a special type of server for hosting this type of website? I know that he will most likely need a dedicated server on account of the bandwidth requirements, but do you need a certain type of server for this type of technology?

And what about WSD (Web Self Distribution)? My client mentioned that he wanted to distribute his films via his website via this method, but I can not find any info on it. Google did not produce an significant results.

Which method is best if WSD is the correct term?

And if you have any other thoughts with regards to the best way to have a pay-per-view section on a website, I'd love to hear it.

Also, if you have any suggestions regarding which companies are best for this type of setup with respect to hosting, shopping cart app, credit card processing company, and anything related to DRM/WSD, please let me know. If you need to PM me, feel free to do so.

Thanks.

P.S. And these films are mainstream films, people, just in case any of you are thinking otherwise.