With high-resolution content consumption becoming ubiquitous today, protecting premium content with appropriate security strategies has become essential. DRM-protected videos with a layer of Forensic Watermarking strengthens the content security framework.

The digital rights management (DRM) technology provides encryption to the premium content and is preferred by studios across the globe to deliver content across multiple devices, OS, and environments, including mobile devices. In the DRM approach, a common encryption format generates encryption keys, which a transcoder or packager uses to produce multi-DRM protected content. The content playback happens through the native component, choosing the appropriate Drm Technology according to the end-user device or player, and uses the inherent browser or OS security features.

Although the DRM approach is a first-level defense to prevent premium content piracy, it falls critically short in controlling piracy at post-production and review stages. Forensic video watermarking complements the DRM technology in helping content owners and distributors track piracy operations across the entire content distribution framework. The technology adds unique, imperceptible unique code sequences at random places and embeds them with the content, unaltered by the post-production processes, like transcoding, downscaling, and other alterations for distribution. The DRM protected video frame undergoes decoding, watermark insertion, and encoding to produce output frames for distribution.

Forensic Watermarking helps the content owner control how and where the content consumption takes place. If content theft and redistribution happen, the watermark in the pirated content stream helps in source device identification. Hollywood studios have started enforcing watermarking solutions as a mandatory offing in the distributors’ environment before distributing DRM protected content post-production. If the premium content’s screening copies find their way online, video watermarking traces the leak’s source.

The distributors often scan the Internet for usual suspect sites which have a history of hosting pirated content. If they come across suspect content, a watermark detector scrutinizes for the watermark. If the match is 100% positive, the watermark facilitates source identification of the illegal stream and subsequent blacklisting of the wrongdoer.

Hence, forensic watermarking deals a killer punch to the nefarious piracy gang and works hand-in-hand to protect the revenue stream of Hollywood studios across the content delivery framework.