New Forensic Watermarks Target VoD Piracy

Subsidiary of Dolby Laboratories, Cinea, has joined forces with Harmonic and NDS with the intention of creating a new integrated video-on-demand (VOD) solution, which will utilise Cinea’s existing Running Marks watermarking technology, Harmonic’s VOD platform, and NDS’s conditional access solution VideoGuard.

The idea of combing these three components is to produce a highly effective watermarking system for VoD on existing set top boxes.

The system will place session-based watermarks into content as well as dealing with conditional access.

This new system is intended to deal with the problem being created by ever shorter “windows” for film releases, which means that movies now arrive on TV screens far faster than they used to.

This, in turn, means that there is often still a market for pirated disc or download versions of the movies that are perhaps being shown on pay per view or other premium TV services.

The new system will not be able to stop copying of content, instead it adds what is known as a forensic watermark, and these cannot be removed from the content.

So if someone records a movie from the TV and then puts it on a site for downloading or sells copies on disc, the company will be able to identify the set top box which the content came from.

This system is the only one that supports session-specific watermarking of pre-encrypted VOD content.

This is particularly useful for keeping IPTV transmissions secure.