With the emergence of OTT as a strong player in the content market, piracy has risen multi-fold. Luckily, content creators and owners, equipped with the twin swords of DRM protected content and forensic watermarking, can bring about a strong deterrence and deal firmly with video piracy through enhanced content protection.
The multi-DRM approach ensures digital rights management (DRM) support for virtually every client platform out there – Google’s Widevine for Android, Apple’s FairPlay, Microsoft’s PlayReady, NCG Android SDK, Chromecast, etc. – with a wide range of support to referral technologies. Though DRM protected content is a security layer that can help control OTT piracy, it falls short in some scenarios. Pirates make use of digital-to-analog (D2A) or analog-to-digital (A2D) conversions to distribute content illegally. High-quality content, similar to 4K UHD streaming, is captured using camcorders and distributed illegally. Here, forensic watermarking comes in handy to track the pirated content.
Forensic watermarking adds an additional layer of security to DRM protected content and provides a seamless and robust mechanism for content owners to take control of their content usage and distribution. The process embeds every genuine copy of the content with imperceptible code sequences at random places. The real-time insertion of codes into the videos makes it very hard to counterfeit the original content. In summary, watermarking empowers the content owner to identify and trace the source of leakage and deal with illegal content distribution effectively - something which is not possible through DRM alone.
Video watermarking seamlessly integrates with the whole content distribution workflow to ensure content leakage detection independent of device type. In combination with multi-DRM, forensic watermarking provides robust end-to-end security wrap around the premium content, right from content encoding to detection in a secure cloud environment.
Though DRM enables content creators and distributors to limit the devices on which their content can stream, but on the flip side, is restrictive too. In this scenario, forensic watermarking comes to the rescue by reducing such limitations by adding imperceptible codes to each copy of genuine video content viewed/ downloaded on the mobile. Thus, the technology tracks any illegal content distribution and effectively prevents piracy across devices and use cases.