Patent ID: 8707456

Claim:
A method comprising: at a gateway network device, receiving from a provider multimedia content, including receiving one or more virtual local area network (VLAN) identifiers to establish VLAN grouping restricting consumption of the received multimedia content to one or more devices communicatively coupled to a local area network associated with the gateway network device; establishing one or more secure connections between the gateway network device and one or more remote network devices; associating one or more different VLAN identifiers with each of the one or more secure connections; packetizing the received multimedia content into one or more packets for communication via the one or more secure connections; tagging the one or more packets with a different VLAN identifier corresponding to a particular secure connection of the one or more secure connections to implement VLAN grouping between the gateway network device and a particular remote network device of the one or more remote network devices while maintaining VLAN grouping used to restrict consumption of distributed multimedia content; and distributing the packetized multimedia content according to a Digital Rights Management (DRM) policy of the provider of the multimedia content.