OTT and live video streaming industries are prone to piracy because of the premium cinematic and sports content they showcase. Major Hollywood studios and sporting event organizers enforce preconditions on protecting content transmission on major OTT players, without which they are not permitted to broadcast high-resolution premium videos. The OTT industry largely relies on digital rights management (DRM) technology to keep pirates at bay. However, industry leaders now realize that using piracy-prevention measures is only one part of the security infrastructure, and identifying piracy is as important.
Forensic watermarking is a technology that allows OTT platforms and content owners to identify illegal content that circulates on the internet. While DRM video protection works through encryption keys which are provided by DRM licensing servers, forensic watermarks are inserted in video frames when they are being encrypted with AES-grade algorithms. Also known as video watermarking, this method embeds user and video asset information in video frames, which stays in the leaked content and can be extracted only with the help of encryption keys that are used at the time of its insertion.
At the heart of video watermarking technology lies the A/B values that are embedded in each video frame. This results in two different outputs which are combined in real time at the time of video playback. The mixed A/B version of the video stream converts session information – like user ID, time of playback, device ID, etc. – into binary format (it can carry information up to 254 bytes in size) and carries it in the output stream in DASH or HLS format. The session data thus stays in the database of the multi-DRM SaaS provider which is used to embed forensic watermarks, while watermark payload of up to seven bytes in size stays in the output file. The watermark payload acts as a key to session data.
If the content leaks at this point, it carries the session information of the video asset playback in the form of watermark payload. Once the compliance departments of OTT platforms identify compromised video assets, they use watermark payloads to identify the user using the multi-DRM SaaS database and proceed with legal action against them.
