The upside of visual watermarking is simplicity, scalability, and cost. If a watermarked movie would end up being shared illegally, the copyright owners could trace it back to a movie theatre and proceed with legal actions. Watermarking has also been added to physical video copies distributed to movie theatres. Their work does not include enjoying video content, much less sharing it illegally, but to add subtitles to it. More traditional fields of application have been intrusive watermarking for subtitling companies etc. Visual watermarking of video content is not a new invention. Visual watermark is applied by the client player software. Note that visual watermarks impact quality of service and must be positioned accordingly.įig 3. Should a broadcasted video clip be illegally shared, the visual watermark would easily identify the perpetrator. The watermark can be added anywhere in the OTT distribution chain, but for our purpose and to make it scalable - identifying a subscriber to a streaming session, the visual watermark is usually applied in the client. We can usually see the branding in the top corner of a TV channel. The Visual watermarking type is what we can all relate to since it is visible and resembles branding TV channels. Bringing pirates to justice has a more generous time plan since it is not directly revenue affecting. This is the primary driver for the content owners to stop the ongoing burglary. Having watermarked their content, they can trace the source stream, identify the subscriber sharing the live event, and shut down the source streaming session. During live events like football championships content owners are monitoring the internet for illegally shared live streams. Watermarking is a passive security tool and does not, intimidation aside, actively prevent hackers to share content illegally. Forensic watermarking is further divided into Manifest based (or A/B watermarking), and Bitstream based watermarking. There are generally two different watermarking techniques: Visual and Forensic. Setting a unique mark to each stream enabling us to identify a user is much harder.The real challenge for watermarking techniques is therefore to make them scalable without increasing latency for live streams. But note that marking a stream is quite easy. This is made possible by the unicast nature of OTT streaming - each viewing session is a unique stream that can be uniquely marked. OTT content watermarking is a security tool that documents ownership to track the original consumer of the content. What is it, why is it used, and how does it work? Watermarking in OTT content distribution is an emerging technology which quickly gains more market interest as this article is written. Watermarking may be the technology that may bring at least illegal live content sharing to an end. But without watermarking there is no way for them to track down the source stream and shut it down. Just like this the content owners, who have paid huge amounts for content rights, can in real time follow an illegally shared live stream. You call the police, but they just say that they cannot do anything about it. You pick up the phone to watch your home security cameras and notice burglars calmly walking around in your home looking for and stealing anything of value. Imagine the following: You are sitting at work when your home alarm goes off in your mobile phone. Illegal live content sharing in the news. Without watermarking we can expect to more frequently read news like the following:įig 1. More recently the developed live streaming distribution technology has enabled hackers to distribute live streams and not only VOD content. More sophisticated methods include screen and audio capturing software, while common people could always use mobile cameras to record the cinema screen. Literally anyone has been capable to relatively safely copy and share content with varied quality of experience. This has been used to copy and illegally distribute and share content. But all these methods share one as common as important flaw when the content is played on a screen the security is completely gone. Looking at the complete picture of securing content (see my other publications on Securing OTT content), we have been obfuscating, encrypting, tokenized, or by analogue methods introduced interference signals to control who has the right to watch content. It could be read without any prior knowledge on the subject. This publication is part of a series of articles describing the principles of the technology behind video streaming. This article is one of three describing the technical principles of securing OTT content. While DRM has been the primary technology for securing content, the focus is slowly shifting to include also watermarking techniques. Written by: Boris Asadanin, Streaming Media Consultant and Partner at Eyevinn Technology Background
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