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COMPANY CONTRIBUTION
Therefore, an effective security measure must
survive conversion from digital to analogue,
and back to digital. Embedding a continuous
watermark into the content’s actual picture or
audio, for example, is one such way to plug the
analogue hole.
An additional simple and popular piracy
method is to use prosumer HD or 4K video
cameras. These cameras make it possible to
create a very high quality copy of video content
directly from the screen of an HD
or UHD display, thus
circumventing any CAS or DRM.
viewing experience that rivals anything they
would pay for. At the same time, operators are
also facing increasing pressure on churn with
valuable to the content owner to know the
source of the stream while the original content
is still being transmitted. Armed with the ID of
the growing number of 'cord cutters' and
competition from OTT services such as Netflix,
Hulu, and Amazon Instant Video.
Current methods of combating this shift
the exact device or client stream that is being
pirated, the content owner and operator can
take direct action to interrupt the session,
thereby preserving the value of the content
itself. This is especially true for ‘single release
window’ content such as sporting events, as
away from file-based piracy and into streambased piracy have limited effectiveness. Under
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),
streaming ecosystem, service
operators and content owners
have the opportunity to convert
users from those illegitimate
sources to legitimate ones.
Live detection brings in new
Watermark identifiers in the
content’s picture or audio that are
robust to such camcording
mitigates this risk by removing
pirate anonymity.
A third way for pirates to easily
circumvent CAS and DRM security
challenges to the pirate
monitoring process. Locating
illicit live streams requires some
alternative strategies to tracking
has been through screen capture
software that is designed to 'scrape'
the contents being displayed on the
screen of a PC (full-screen or a
selected area). Since this capture
takes place after DRM or CAS has
been authenticated, this method also defeats
file-based security measures and copyprotection tools. Once again, a unique
watermark in the content itself that is robust
to transcoding would mitigate this risk.
A fourth, and slightly more sophisticated,
method of streaming piracy is a man-in-themiddle attack on content delivered over-thetop (OTT). This type of piracy is designed to
access the video stream on unauthorised
devices or to circumvent client-side protection,
capturing instead the video stream en route to
its authorised final destination. An OTT
streaming solution must therefore offer serverside watermarking to be effective against this
type of piracy, thereby enabling the service
provider to trace these streams back to the
originally intended consumer.
Piracy and the consumer experience
Illegal streaming used to offer only a poor
quality experience compared to file sharing.
Streaming video had the resolution of a
pirate content on Torrent
for example, it is possible for rights owners to
monitor the Internet and ask web sites to
remove infringing content—a practice known
as 'DMCA Take-Downs'. This remains a
common approach which can be very effective
with cooperative streaming sites. On many of
the largest commercial UGC sites, streams can
be taken down in minutes. However, as takedowns are growing in regularity, piracy is
shifting rapidl