What is Video Watermarking?
Video Watermarking is the process of embedding a signal into a piece of video content to help identify its ownership, copyright, and authenticity for a piece of content.
How does it work?
Video Watermarking can be broken down into two types: perceptible and imperceptible. Perceptible watermarking often sees an image such as a logo or text being superimposed over the content. On its own perceptible watermarking often isn’t enough to stop piracy. Instead, streaming companies tend to use the more powerful alternative in the form of imperceptible video watermarking.
With this, metadata such as device ID, time stamps, IP address and User IDs, can all be embedded within imperceptible video watermarks and can be used to track down leaks and the source of the piracy. Unlike perceptible watermarking, imperceptible watermarking is applied using a back-end identifier and is invisible to an end user.
What is Client Side Watermarking?
There are two types of imperceptible watermarking solutions, client-side watermarking, and server-side watermarking. Verimatrix Streamkeeper™ watermarking allows a user to leverage both forms.
Client-side watermarking is most often applied to live sports streams thanks to the faster watermark extraction cycle. A content provider can add client-side watermarks during playback via third-party libraries or code within their player.
The issues with client-side watermarking are that each unique device or content player requires custom integrations and often requires the use of code obfuscation technology on top to prevent reverse engineering and the blocking of watermark insertion.
What is Server-Side Watermarking?
Server-side watermarking is regarded as the safer of the two types of imperceptible watermarking due to its ability to offer better protection and due to it being cloud based. It doesn’t expose unprotected content to a large audience and marked content can be played across a wide range of OTT devices without the need for complex integration. It also allows the use of more efficient watermarks resulting in a better end user experience.
In short, server-side watermarking creates a content-specific perpetual model which is harder for malicious users to exploit.
