Limitations of existing MPEG-1 ciphers for streaming video

Copyright protection is one of the many aspects of implementing a commercially successful video streaming service and encryption of content is one means through which Copyright can be protected. MPEG-1 is one of the many video compression techniques used in streaming video and a number of MPEG-1 ciphers have been proposed in the past. These ciphers were primarily designed with the idea of public storage of MPEG-1 content. In this paper I consider the suitability of these ciphers in a streaming video context. The conclusion is that none of the existing ciphers are suitable for use in streaming MPEG-1 video and that a new cipher is required for this purpose.