Forensic watermarking and DRM/CAS technologies
Medialive launched a new SDK product range: m2mark, which features a highly secure approach to merging forensic watermarking and DRM/CAS technologies. The solution integrates Running Marks, a forensic watermarking technology licensed from Cinea. The collaboration enables customers to benefit from these security features provided by the newly developed technologies.
A unique element of the new m2mark system is that the watermarks are added while the content is still scrambled, so that clear content always contains the watermark. The in-depth integration of Running Marks with the Medialive technology brings an easy-to-deploy and cost-effective solution that reinforces the content protection from source to end-user devices.
The Medialive digital content protection technology consists in extracting the most pertinent data (about 1%) from the original bitstream, at random positions chosen from a set of relevant locations, and replaces this data with pseudo-random dummy data, while keeping altogether the compliance according to the native format and the size of the bitstream. The newly created content is called the “self-protected content” and it can be super-distributed on any type of distribution system (web portals, P2P networks, physical media support, etc.) and can be played back by any device implementing a standard multimedia codec (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, etc.).
The m2mark solution is a key enabler of market trends: Web VOD, IPTV media emergence, HD content demand increase and new advertising models. Medialive’s unique combination of content protection and content identification allows: controlling content distribution, providing content owners with technical means to dissuade digital piracy and improving the user experience (being “imperceptible” to consumers) while being interoperable with existing DRM/CAS and tracking systems.
Video forensic watermarking (or session-based watermarking) is the embedding of an imperceptible and unique identifier in a video stream with the intent to later recover those marks. Watermarking acts as an active enforcement tool against piracy by enabling content owners to track pirated content back to its source and as a deterrent by keeping honest people honest.