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Deciding How and When to Issue Licenses
You can issue licenses for files in different ways. You first need to decide whether you issue licenses for only those items that are downloaded or streamed, or for all your digital media files at once. For example, you can issue a license for a digital media file when the consumer downloads it. Or, if your inventory of digital media files is not very large, you might issue licenses for all available files when a consumer first subscribes to your site.
Note For player applications based on Windows Media Format 7 SDK, there is a limitation to the number of licenses you can issue with one call to the RMGetLicense.StoreLicense method (the approximate limit is 10 licenses). To avoid this problem, you can detect which application is sending a request and issue licenses accordingly.
The next decision is how you want to issue licenses. Predelivery is usually the least obtrusive method for consumers. This method lets you deliver the license before a packaged file is played. When licenses are predelivered, the consumer always has both a packaged file and its license, so the additional license acquisition step is not necessary. For example, if a consumer selects a song to download, you could predeliver the license while the file is being transferred. Or, for streamed files, you could predeliver the license before the file begins to stream.
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