for live events can be beneficial. Studios have been known to use a combination of visible and invisible watermarking, which serve different purposes. It depends on the situation.
Q: How do you find watermarked content in the field? A: Studios have partners that constantly monitor the web for unauthorised leaks of video as a routine matter. When a file is found, it is sent back to the content provider. Studios first look for the distributor watermark, which identifies the distributor from which the file came. The file is sent to the distributor and they examine the file for evidence of the sessionbased watermark which will identify the specific device or user involved in the leak.
Q: Can you protect against pirates using VPNs to access and rip content? What about users creating new accounts for each infringement? A: Pirates using VPNs to access early-window and other premium content offerings might succeed in hiding their true IP address, but in the case of transactional VoD / EST or any SVoD or other subscription-based business model, they still have to register an account and pay for the content before it is sent to them. That account registration and payment information will be captured in the watermark payload and, once recovered, will be available to law enforcement authorities, along with the date and time of acquisition and any playback from the distributor’ s servers. Even if the authorities are not able to see the pirate’ s true IP address in connection with the acquisition and initial playback of the file, the subsequent upload of the file to the internet will also produce evidence as to the identity of the individual or group responsible for the upload.
In the case of users creating new accounts for each infringement, each such account creation will create its own evidence package, which can be linked together by the distributor and by law enforcement authorities.
In short, effective use of forensic watermarking and related techniques always provides content providers and law enforcement authorities with valuable anti-piracy evidence that would not otherwise exist and which raises pirates’ risk of getting caught.
Q: How good are the latest watermarking technologies at surviving attacks such as collusion, down-res( blurring), mirroring and cropping? A: One of the requirements for a good watermarking technology is that it needs to resist a certain level of attack and we certainly test against collusion attacks. What’ s interesting about collusion is you may actually end up revealing all of the sources that colluded. Watermarking is not like cryptography where if you are trying to break something, eventually you know if you have succeeded because you see clear video. With watermarking, you never know if you’ ve succeeded in removing or damaging the mark or whether you’ ve just left the fingerprint of everyone who participated.
Studios and other organisations test visibility / perceptibility and robustness of watermarking technologies. Transcoding, lowering resolution, cropping, camcording and other attacks are included in these tests. There are certainly limits to what watermarking can survive but at the same time, if the stolen copy is of such a poor quality that the watermarking could not be recovered, that content has likely very little value.
Q: Can anything be said about the type of content and associated time it takes to apply / detect the watermark? A: The most efficient insertion technique for watermarking is the hardware-based, preintegrated client-side insertion which supports UHD quality video. A pure software based client-side insertion is still efficient, but due to bandwidth efficiency may only be suitable for
HD video. In that case, operators may think about utilising a pre-integrated server-side solution.
Watermark extraction or detection is highly dependent on the quality of the pirated content. It takes a matter of minutes to extract the watermark from standard definition or high definition content without distortions. If there are several distortions on the file, the mark can still be extracted, but it takes a bit longer. Bottom line, distributors of premium video should no longer assume that widescale enforcement of forensic watermarking requirements by license holders is still well off in the future. Service providers have been on notice for some time that watermarking would be intrinsic to obtaining rights to distribute ultra HD( UHD) programming once there was a sufficient volume of content in the pipeline to merit the use of the technology. Given the surge in 4K and HDR-enhanced UHD Premium content targeted to a growing population of UHD set owners, it’ s clear that moment is at hand.
For more information, visit: www. verimatrix. com / watermarking
Case Study
Twentieth Century Fox has successfully used a watermarking-based strategy as a piracy deterrent ever since it began releasing early-window Super Premium VoD( SPVoD) releases in South Korea in early 2014.
Working with its local distribution partners, Fox’ s strategy for deterring piracy of these early-window releases has had three key elements:( 1) Embedding of an invisible but robust session-based watermark in each customer viewing session;( 2) Running a pre-roll card warning customers that as a result of such watermarking, any piracy they engage in can be traced back to them;( 3) Referrals of customers who engage in such piracy anyway to law enforcement authorities for investigation and criminal punishment.
The results of this strategy are best viewed by comparing these early-window releases with‘ traditional’ releases that are not watermarked. Normally, every traditional release is pirated almost immediately. But Fox’ s watermarking strategy has enabled it to delay highquality piracy of its SPVoD releases by an average of a week, and in some cases for multiple weeks.
Each high-quality piracy-free day is a day when the only way to obtain a high-quality version of the title is to acquire it legitimately, and maximising the number of high-quality piracy-free days is the goal of every preventive antipiracy strategy. Courtesy: Twentieth Century Fox
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