Forensic Watermarkingen Español 

The Challenge – Evolving Media Landscape

Managing digital content throughout an ever more complex - yet increasingly compressed - media lifecycle, while attempting to maximize the associated asset monetization, is presenting rights owners with new opportunities as well as threats. After the costly loss of control of recorded music distribution, the motion picture industry has also become severely impacted by content piracy. Worldwide loss of business for that particular industry and other content owners presents significant challenges not only to established distribution channels, but now even more so given that content increasingly finds its way beyond the traditional outlets. The media lifecycle is constantly morphing in often unpredictable ways, raising the bar for rights owners and technology providers alike.

The Promise of Watermarking

In response to the ever-shifting media monetization challenges, a variety of techniques are being developed and deployed to help address the protection of video content over its full lifecycle. One of the most promising of these techniques is “forensic watermarking.” The use of watermarking for digital video content, which draws on long established technologies combined with new and innovative approaches, has many promising aspects that directly address key challenges in the fight to maintain and enhance the revenue potential in content distribution systems.

A Powerful Solution – Digital Watermarking

Digital watermarking is a technology that seeks to securely, robustly and imperceptibly embed identifying information within copies of media content. These aspects benefit from some amplification:

• Imperceptible marking is required to preserve the quality of the viewer experience and avoid any implication that the delivery channel that uses watermarking reduces the integrity of the original material. Imperceptible marking draws a specific contrast to some visible overlay techniques used to help trace illegitimate channel rebroadcasting.
• Security is necessary to preserve the integrity of the inserted information, and especially to prevent any modification of embedded watermark information as copies are distributed.
• Robustness ensures that the watermark remains readable through any reasonable manipulation or transformation of the media. The most robust watermarks will survive multiple transitions from digital to analog format and be unaffected by filtering and distortion.

In comparison to other digital media such as audio, digitally distributed movies and other high value content can be protected particularly well by digital watermarking. Digital video is a composition of many individual images, with a much larger amount of data than other media files. Therefore it offers more scope to robustly embed information, when suitable technologies are applied. With advanced methods that make use of the density of information to insert watermarking payloads, video can be more effectively secured than audio or textual media. The relative sizes of content and payload make it difficult to remove by processing, re-encoding or even targeted filtering attacks.

Video Watermarking for Forensic Tracking

A specific application is the so-called user-specific forensic tracking, the goal of which is to help identify the source of unauthorized copies of media files and trace them back to the last authorized recipient or the legitimate content owner. User-specific forensic watermarking is an application that embeds a timestamp and identifying data, e.g. the service operator, content, transaction and end-user ID. This establishes a virtual “chain of custody” for content that accurately identifies the source of unauthorized copies, and which hence provides a valuable tool in potential legal actions against the perpetrator. Moreover, the presence of an identifying watermark will no doubt serve to deter piracy if the user is made aware - beforehand - that the content is traceable to the last authorized recipient. Thus, forensic watermarking is a key component of a layered content and revenue protection strategy.

Forensic Watermarking in the Media Value Chain

The application of watermarking is not limited to a single insertion point in the value chain. Instead, watermarking can be applied at various stages during the content distribution cycle: in the studio, in the distribution network, and finally in the receiver.

Moreover, multiple watermarks from different sources can in principle be applied to the same content and extracted individually later. Forensic tracing is thus enabled at multiple stages in the value chain, with the possibility to trace lost content to its last authorized user.

Verimatrix Watermarking Innovations and Solutions

Verimatrix has been investing in watermarking R&D for more than 10 years and is a global leader in the practical application and commercialization of forensic video watermarking solutions as a component of the company's layered content and revenue security strategy. After pioneering watermark insertion in the video output of set-top boxes (STBs) and PCs, Verimatrix introduced another innovative revenue security tool, distribution network watermarking. Common to both is an emphasis on invisible payloads, without impacting the consumer experience, while supporting the full range of features that rights owners require, including legally defensible identification.

Verimatrix VideoMark™

The patented VideoMark technology (US patent no. 7430302) is designed to embed watermarks in client devices. Using only a fraction of the device CPU power, VideoMark enables real-time insertion of a payload within the baseband video output of the client device. The payload is present in all digital and analog output signals while invisible to the viewer. VideoMark insertion can be controlled on a program by program basis through information embedded in the transport stream alongside other video copy control parameters. The approach taken in the insertion process means very little information is changed on a frame-by-frame basis, making the watermark extremely robust against attacks by re-compression, aspect ratio manipulation and filtering. In practice, the VideoMark payload can still be extracted from extremely low grade analog copies of the original content, and the information contained can be used to determine the time and place where the copy was originally made.

VideoMark is an integrated component of the Verimatrix ViewRight^® STB for IPTV and PC Player clients, and an optional component of the Verimatrix Video Content Authority Systems (VCAS™) for IPTV. It can also be deployed as a complementary security technology in existing broadcasting systems. Download VideoMark product sheet.

Verimatrix StreamMark^®

StreamMark^®, a patent pending Verimatrix revenue security innovation, is a user-specific forensic watermarking technology that uses a highly efficient server-side embedding process to uniquely mark compressed content files during delivery, even when these content files already are encrypted. Mass delivery of uniquely marked content offers a valuable tool to combat revenue leakage in the latest video consumption models, such as over-the-top (OTT) delivery to standard CE devices.

StreamMark^® embeds transaction unique, forensic tracing information in digital content before distribution to each one of a network of client devices. The current version of StreamMark^® supports MPEG-2 and MPEG-4/AVC content in MPEG-2 Transport Stream or MPEG-4 ISO file format. The embedding process is architected to have extremely low overhead - to the point where it can be easily added as a component of stream based media delivery environments with negligible performance impact. It enables the embedding of a robust, secure and imperceptible transaction or customer identifier in compressed and encrypted content before distribution to standard decoders and media players in STBs, PCs and mobile devices.
Download StreamMark^® product sheet.

Verimatrix/Reveal™ Service

The Verimatrix/Reveal™ Service is offered in order to extract and interpret the embedded payload, thus providing convenience for VideoMark and StreamMark^® customers and, importantly, security against arbitrary verification.

To get a perspective on how these watermarking technologies can be applied further, please download the Verimatrix whitepaper “Integrated Watermarking Creates More Durable Pay-TV Businesses” or contact Verimatrix.

Verimatrix is a leading member of the Digital Watermarking Alliance.