Company Contribution
Integrated forensic
watermarking
T
he arrival of ultra-HD (UHD) TV has
led in part by the Ultra HD Forum, have
been associated with the emergence
generally agreed on forensic watermarking
of forensic watermarking as a
as an essential part of the content protection
major new component of pay-TV security to
ecosystem.
complement traditional conditional access
Similarly, the consensus behind
(CA) systems and digital rights management
watermarking has extended among rights
(DRM) systems. In many ways, the Internet
holders beyond the movie studios to include
can be named the root cause of such security
other providers of premium content, including
requirements, with its evident disruptive
live sports. It is now inevitable that forensic
effects on video distribution, and the
watermarking will be mandated not just
associated landscape of threats to
revenue, therefore stimulating the
Petr Peterka, CTO,
deployment of additional security
Verimatrix, explains
technologies.
how the integration
Initially, the Internet-enabled
of forensic
control word sharing (key
watermarking
redistribution) over the web so that
people could bypass traditional CA.
bolsters content
As Internet access has become more
protection regimes in
universal and with higher bandwidth,
the UHD era.
this has now been overtaken by illicit
redistribution of the content itself.
Proliferation of over-the-top (OTT) services
by sports rights holders themselves, but
combined with the advent of UHD means
also leading distributors and operators
that even higher quality content is readily
fearful of revenues in leading markets being
available online. This makes it easier and
undermined by service providers in other
more attractive for pirates to capture the
regions allowing pirated streams to leak out.
video either by camcording or in some cases
Sky has been among broadcasters exerting
recording direct from HDMI cables and then
pressure on some of its content providers to
redistributing over the internet.
ensure that they uphold similar standards in
It is true
that watermarking
only emerged on the
security agenda for most
pay-TV operators with its
inclusion by MovieLabs in 2014 when it
recommended the technique for protecting
premium UHD content against piracy. At the
time, the revenue security community was
divided between those who had anticipated
this approach and those who had not. Yet
since that time the community as a whole,
12 Content Security
other markets served by
different distributors.
Verimatrix was the first
leading security provider to
develop and promote forensic
watermarking as a key security
layer to protect premium content. The
company extended its expertise to address
the growing threat to live sports posed by
online content redistribution with the launch
of our VideoMark Live profile in September
2015. This was the latest component of our
watermarking VideoMark toolbox, this time
specifically designed to protect valuable linear
content against real-time re-broadcasting
threats.
Watermarking is only a part of the
solution
Several important points arise in this context,
the first being that watermarking is the only
proven way of linking illicit redistributions
back to the subscribing account from which
they originated in the case of legacy pay
TV, or to the source streaming session
for OTT.
While the traditional combination
of CA and DRM systems ensures that
content is delivered to authorised users
subject to rules governing factors such
as device, location and whether it can be
played or stored, it offers no protection
against the capture and redistribution of
the content once playback has begun. To
meet this fast growing threat, content
owners and operators need to extend their
security solutions to include robust forensic
watermarking, which enables marks to be
embedded within video on a session basis
so that client devices can subsequently be
identified to the last legal recipient.
This leads to an equally important second
point, which is that while watermarking is
essential, it is only one component of the
overall solution for protecting against stream
piracy. When watermarking was applied in
Digital Cinema, the objective was to identify
theatres where camc