With streaming services becoming the heart line of the media and entertainment industry, online piracy of premium video content has also been on the rise. Premium content like movies, TV shows, sporting events, etc., are leaked by malicious agents to generate revenue which jeopardizes the studio and film businesses.
Today’s media scenario demands that most pre-release content goes through several stages of editing, reviews, localization, etc., with a high risk of content leakage involved at each stage. Even after reaching the end-user, premium content can be illegally distributed among unauthorized consumers to generate revenue.
This high vulnerability of content has created a need to have robust content security strategies. Thus, most content providers follow a multi-layered end-to-end security strategy that secures the entire content value chain. While DRM protected content can be used for secure distribution, solutions like forensic watermarking and anti-capture technology deter piracy from the end user’s device.
The demand for sports content is at an all-time high. This has made sport broadcasts a huge revenue generator for broadcasters as well as a prime target of pirates. However, the value of sporting events is the highest when they are life. Hence, time is of absolute essence when it comes to disrupting illegal live streaming. Pirates have also started removing the broadcaster’s logo from the stream. A unique and robust watermark needs to be used to identify the source of leaked content even after being obfuscated. Studios must be able to quickly identify and remove infringing content.
This is where just-in-time video watermarking comes into play. Here, the watermark can be embedded into the content on the fly. This helps live content broadcasters ensure that any illegal activity is immediately detected, and the source of leakage can be identified in just one to two minutes. In addition, the integration point to embed the watermark can be moved to the just-in-time packager used by operators and broadcasters. What this means is that the encoder used by them can remain the same while there are no extra CDN storage costs.
The just-in-time option gives content providers the best of both worlds by merging the benefits of on-demand head-end-based watermarking techniques with a fast detection time. This can then be implemented alongside a robust piracy control service to secure content as well the revenue and broadcasting rights.
