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What glitches should a robust forensic watermarking solution address?

    The video streaming market faces the continuous challenge of warding off sophisticated piracy attempts on streams of premium video content. OTT platforms and major Hollywood studios prefer to combine a multi-DRM approach with forensic watermarking solutions to authenticate users and trace piracy.

    However, OTT platforms are global companies that have to manage their IT infrastructure across the globe, which puts pressure on the anti-piracy measures and lead to many glitches. In the case of video watermarking techniques, the content delivery platform can take the following precautions to ensure that the system stays robust against global attacks as well as offers smooth delivery to the user across geographies:

    • Optimize metadata files: A content delivery platform should ensure that its storage and bandwidth footprint stays low. For effective forensic watermarking, the platform should keep the metadata at the edge server, which writes unique data after ascertaining the user to which a particular video file will be delivered. The metadata approach is lighter on resources than duplicating the whole asset and saves bandwidth both at the server and the client’s end.
    • Cache optimization: Delivery platforms should consider shifting to bitstream-based watermarking technology rather than choosing the A/B variant option. If a single variant of the video asset is processed by the CDN, its cache can be optimized with a longer life, thus increasing the delivery speed.
    • Faster embedding process: Delivery platforms should optimize the watermark embedding process, as speed is of critical importance in the streaming space. No user likes to wait endlessly for the video asset to buffer after making a query. The delivery platform should choose the adaptive bitrate segmentation for faster watermark insertion and opt for a vendor that inserts watermarks in single chunks.
    • Network security: The delivery platform should ensure that all critical operations of watermark embedding in DRM protect content take place on the server rather than on the client device, since it is more difficult to attack a server than the client device.

    These precautions can not only ensure a faster watermark embedding process, it also spruces up the security of the asset in combination with multi-DRM application.