In the last 10 years, over 100 unique streaming services have launched around the world, with a mass acceleration of new services launched in 2020 as a result of the pandemic. This growth in new services shows no indication of slowing any time soon, as new niche verticals like eLearning, faith-based services, fitness, and entertainment (live music/theater) are building out their own services to expand their reach and monetize their content. There is also significant growth in the world of live sports and eSports – where individual clubs and leagues are launching their own direct-to-consumer streaming services to create new revenue streams, better engage with fans and grow their audiences. 
Although a new streaming venture sounds promising, publishing high-quality content, such as a highly effective workout regime, a breathtaking play, or a comeback artist with a digital-only concert, comes with the risk of piracy. According to a report by Sandvine, the video piracy ecosystem is worth nearly $1 billion USD in the US alone.
Streaming services must address the threat of video piracy. There are a variety of tools available and in recent years, most services have been investing in multi-DRM technologies which are a critical and effective first line of defense against piracy. Concurrency management is also an option that some major streaming providers have applied as a way to limit password sharing. Although Parks Associates estimates that password sharing accounts for $9.1 – 12.5 Billion in lost revenue, some streaming services have taken a lax approach, hoping to eventually convert sharing users into paid subscribers. However, it’s an important topic to address when so much money is on the line. Finally, there’s watermarking, which has existed since the early 13th century as a method to ensure authenticity for print and imagery but has gradually crossed the gap into video.

What is Video Watermarking?

Watermarking is the process of covertly embedding some kind of “signal” into a piece of content to help identify the ownership, copyright, and/or authenticity of a given piece of content. For the purposes of this post – we’ll focus on digital images and video content, although watermarks are also used for print and audio content as well. Video watermarking can be broken down into two categories – perceptible and imperceptible. Perceptible watermarks usually involve superimposing a logo or text over a piece of content. 
In some cases the perceptible video watermarks can simply include a logo of the video player, brand, or broadcast service, similar to the example from Bitmovin’s Player:

On the other hand, just applying a logo or a watermark overlay often isn’t enough to actually deter piracy. For that, you’ll need to use the more powerful alternative, imperceptible video watermarking. Metadata such as User ID, device ID, IP address, and time stamps, can be embedded within imperceptible video watermarks and used as forensic evidence to track down the source of piracy and leaks. As you can see in the image below, the imperceptible video watermark is applied using a back-end identifier and is completely transparent to the end client.

Client-side vs Server-side Forensic Watermarking Solutions 

Taking this one step further, there are two types of imperceptible watermarking solutions, client-composited watermarking and server-side watermarking. Client-composited watermarking is applied on a given consumer’s device such as set-top boxes, OTT clients or applications, mobile or tablet devices, and smart TVs, while the server-side forensic watermarking solution is integrated with the video processing platform.
Client-composited forensic watermarking solution 
Client-composited watermarking is one of the most commonly applied methods for live sports due to the faster watermark extraction cycle. In most cases, a content provider can apply client-side watermarks during playback via code or third-party libraries integrated with their player. There are a couple of caveats to client-side watermarking:

1. Custom integrations are necessary for each unique device or player 
2. It often requires code obfuscation technology on top of the client-composited watermarking solution to prevent reverse engineering and blocking the watermark insertion process.  

Server-side forensic watermarking
Server-side forensic watermarking is applied at the encoding and packaging stage of the content delivery process, often creating two copies of every file, with distinct  “A” and “B” watermarks. For ABR streaming, the A/B watermarking process is applied as follows:

1. Video content is broken down into chunks (segments) 
2. During the encoding process, segments are duplicated and embedded with distinct Watermark A and Watermark B variants 
3. Both A and B segment variants are output and stored for delivery by a CDN
4. When a player requests segments, the CDN sends a unique combination of A and B segments to each player, (ex: Customer #1 gets ABABA, Customer #2 gets ABBAA, Customer #3 gets BBBAA) 
5. The Watermarking Provider’s Detection Service uses the pattern of A/B segments in a pirate stream to identify the session and subscriber responsible for the leak and take appropriate action.

Video Watermarking Applied

Given that the current market for all video piracy (password sharing included) is expected to surpass $67 billion worldwide by 2023, it’s imperative that video content providers, old and new alike, establish robust content protection practices. Video watermarking is a good defensive strategy to identify the pirates behind stolen content and piracy services. It’s important to use all of the major content protection and anti-piracy tools available, from multi-DRM and concurrency management, to code and application obfuscation, all the way to forensic watermarking.

Video technology guides and articles

• Back to Basics: Guide to the HTML5 Video Tag 
• What is a VoD Platform?A comprehensive guide to Video on Demand (VOD)
• Video Technology [2022]: Top 5 video technology trends
• HEVC vs VP9: Modern codecs comparison
• What is the AV1 Codec?
• Video Compression: Encoding Definition and Adaptive Bitrate
• What is adaptive bitrate streaming
• MP4 vs MKV: Battle of the Video Formats
• AVOD vs SVOD; the “fall” of SVOD and Rise of AVOD & TVOD (Video Tech Trends)
• MPEG-DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP)
• Container Formats: The 4 most common container formats and why they matter to you.
• Quality of Experience (QoE) in Video Technology [2022 Guide]

The post Everything you need to know about Video Watermarking appeared first on Bitmovin.

Article 5 – From one end to the other: Protecting content from origination to playback, once and for all

• Joshua Shulman, Digital Marketing Specialist, Bitmovin
• Alan Ogilvie, Lead Product Manager, Friend MTS
• Ali Hodjat, Product Marketing Director, Intertrust Technologies

Any player in the OTT world would have a hard time keeping up with the myriad of changes we have seen over the past several months: COVID-19. The dramatic increase in video consumption. The exponential rise in subscriptions to established OTT streaming services. New OTT streaming services. PVOD. Fragmentation of content. But enter the other player – the content pirate – and things become even more complicated. 
As we reviewed in our first article, the stakes are high – very high. A recent report from Parks Associates finds that the value of pirate video services accessed by pay-TV and non-pay TV consumers will exceed $67 billion (USD) worldwide by 2023. Another report from ABI Research estimates that more than 17% of worldwide video streaming users access content illegally. The impact on OTT streaming services is a direct and significant blow to the bottom line.

Securing OTT Content

To stay alive in this environment, OTT companies have no choice but to secure content delivery and playback at a multiplayer level, which includes:

• Protecting content with technology within and around the video player: the consumer playback experience.
• Protecting content from “players”: the pirates – the potential bad actors looking to compromise your service, and steal content. This is the human factor.

If you’re an OTT service launching premium exclusive content, don’t be the one that suddenly discovers your content appearing, and then being distributed through pirate services, within minutes of launch.

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

Often considered the cornerstone of content and revenue protection strategy, digital rights management (DRM) remains a critical part of an effective multi-prong system. In Article 2, Intertrust Technologies discussed the pros and cons of two DRM license acquisition models (direct acquisition model, from a license server, and proxy license acquisition model, from a proxy server).
Intertrust also discussed DRM best practices for leveraging a cloud-based DRM service to protect high-value streaming content. OTT operators must follow these to block the loopholes that hackers otherwise may use to defeat the purpose of DRM technology.

• Multiple content encryption keys (CEK) – Setting different CEKs for audio track, as well as for each video resolution, enables OTT streaming service providers to grant access to content distributed to different customers/different devices. They can do this by delivering only the DRM licenses with CEKs for the authorized resolutions based on the consumer’s subscription package.
• DRM security levels – Defining the security tier of the DRM stack that is supported by the target device, with two relevant distinctions: software-based DRM client and hardware-based DRM client. Using the right DRM security level allows OTT streaming service providers to map the required security level for each given resolution or track.
• Widevine Verified Media Path (VMP) – The requirement enforced by Google Widevine DRM is specifically relevant when a browser-based video player is used to decrypt Widevine-protected content. Given Google’s recent policy to strictly enforce the VMP requirement, Widevine license servers can only issue licenses for content decryption modules that support the VMP feature.

Securing the Playback Experience

Delivering high-value premium content to a web browser can be a risky venture, but one that is critical to reaching audiences today. Browser environments are amongst the farthest-reaching, but least secure, due to their open nature, and require some extra attention when implementing content protection systems.
Bitmovin highlighted in Article 3 how code obfuscation tools and techniques work in browser playback environments where website code (JavaScript) is interpreted and executed. The result is code that is extremely difficult to read and reverse-engineer, either by tinkerers or a more determined actor…such as a content pirate.
Yet executing code on a web browser, following open JavaScript standards, remains impossible to completely secure playback. Someone with enough motivation, and time to spend gathering intelligence and doing research, will eventually be able to reverse-engineer your playback code. In reviewing its web player, Bitmovin detailed how concurrent management and domain locking work as part of a complete defense strategy to deter attacks from content pirates.
Finally, once an OTT provider has secured its distribution chain from source to the playback environment, and has followed best practices to secure the playback experience as much as possible, Bitmovin summarized three golden rules to boost users’ experience – and ultimately, your brand.

Watermarking and Monitoring

For all of its merits, the reality is that DRM only protects the delivery and distribution of content to the point of consumption. Article 4 Friend MTS showed that beyond DRM there is a need to detect pirated content, deter wrongdoers by identifying them in stolen content, and take action to stop further loss of revenue by disabling access to the service. 
Although DRM protects the content until it arrives at its intended legitimate destination, additional precautions should be made to stop content from being redistributed by those who have no rights to do so.
Commonly pirates will capture content directly from the screen (with the use of screen recording software) or a device’s digital output with rights management removed. They’re able to rip the stream once the content is decrypted by the authorized devices. 
So, if DRM protects only the legitimate path from origination to the point of consumption, the OTT operator must protect the value of video content – whether original or rights-managed – outside of these service boundaries. How? Forensic subscriber-level watermarking can be employed on any delivered video in the service. Doing so affords the ability to identify the ‘subscriber’, your legitimate user. Using a combination of active monitoring of piracy groups and sites – suspected pirate materials are identified through known reference fingerprints, and an extraction process can take place to obtain the subscriber identifying data within the watermark. This can rapidly signpost the “bad actors”, low volume content sharers, and industrial-scale pirates. Action can then be taken to stop the content from being accessed and used for piracy. 
With an effective subscriber-level watermarking solution, you can close the loop and start to lock down piracy at its source.
Friend MTS reviewed the pros and cons of A/B variant (server-side) and client-composited (client-side) watermarking and looked at how they are deployed and function. Client-composited is the clear winner with its rapid detection of content theft, lower overall cost, reduced deployment complexity, faster time-to-market, and higher adaptability to attacks on watermarks.
In looking at the characteristics of an effective client-composited watermarking service, Friend MTS outlined its Advanced Subscriber Identification (ASiD) service, which has retained its agility to fend off attacks and has proven robustness in both broadcast and OTT environments. They highlighted the importance of a watermarking provider not only keeping up with the latest pirate schemes but staying ahead of them. They also detailed the key watermarking features of speed, global reach and ability to deliver through a multi-CDN service – all within the context of live sports and entertainment, pay-per-view and on-demand content.
Article 4 also highlights the need to understand the ‘human factor’ in your OTT service – the end-users who are consuming content. Friend MTS advised starting with a position of ‘zero trust’ for your users – assume some users of your service will attempt to circumvent security controls or use your service in a way you didn’t intend. Errant or undesired behavior within your service can be broken down into various ‘personas’ and the article takes you through several of these.
Once user behaviours are understood, you can plan your monitoring architecture, and how your business support systems should respond to service misuse.

Conclusion

Today’s OTT world is radically different than it was in early 2020. Bad actors abound. Content and revenue are at risk literally every minute of every day around the world. But you do not need to be a victim.
It’s possible to take steps upfront to secure content, working with a multi-pronged strategy that integrates DRM, client-composited forensic watermarking, player security, and robust monitoring to produce a real solution to the problem of content piracy. In today’s world, “end-to-end” is not just an IT buzzword. It’s a way of delivering streaming media to a playback client in the most secure and protective environment that we can achieve. 
______________________________________________________________________
Join us for our Webinar on the 18th of November. We’ll be continuing the discussion on the content distribution chain and the importance of delivering streaming content in the most secure ways possible while protecting both your content and revenue. 

Visit How to Trust Your Player

Check out the full blog series below:

• How To Trust Your Player #1 – Tips from the Top: Secure Content Delivery and Playback
• How to Trust Your Player #2: Securing Content Access with DRM Best Practices by Intertrust
• How to Trust Your Player #3: How to Secure Your Content in Challenging Streaming Environments
• How to Trust Your Player #4: Beyond DRM – Video Watermarking

View the webinar on the How to Trust Your Player Page
View the fireside chat series:

• Video 1
• Video 2
• Vide0 3
• Video 4

Download this article as a PDF
Download the full series as a PDF
______________________________________________________________________
“How To Trust Your Player” is a collaborative effort between Bitmovin, Friend MTS and Intertrust Technologies. The goal is to educate media and content providers on the importance of delivering streaming content in the most secure ways possible, from the video player to the end consumer, while protecting both content and revenue. 

Bitmovin

Bitmovin is a developer of video streaming technology. Built for technical professionals in the OTT video market, the company’s software solutions work to provide the best viewer experience imaginable by optimizing customer operations and reducing time to market.
Bitmovin’s solution suite – a video encoder, player, and analytics platform – lets content owners redefine the viewer experience through API-based workflow optimization, fast content turnaround, and scalability. 
Founded in 2012, the company is based in San Francisco, with offices in major cities in Europe, North America and South America. With more than 250 enterprise customers around the globe, Bitmovin helps power clients like BBC, fuboTV, Hulu Japan, RTL, and iFlix.

Friend MTS

Friend MTS helps media and entertainment businesses secure content so that revenue can grow and creativity can thrive. 
With advanced services that measure, monitor, detect, and disable content piracy, Friend MTS provides a 360-degree view of the constantly shifting content piracy protection ecosystem. The company stays a step ahead of ever-advancing and sophisticated content piracy behavior and technology with a sharp, deliberate, laser-focused commitment to continual monitoring and innovation.
Businesses and nonprofit organizations throughout the world recognize Friend MTS as the leading authority for content and revenue protection. The company also has donated its digital fingerprint technology to the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children to tackle child abuse content online.
Founded in 2000, Friend MTS is headquartered in Birmingham, England, with operations throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and North America. Friend MTS is the recipient of an Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering, presented by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (2018).

Intertrust Technologies

Intertrust provides the world’s leading digital rights management (DRM) cloud service with a complete ecosystem of security and rights management products. The company empowers businesses to securely manage all of their data and devices, regardless of location, format, or type – enabling innovative multi-party apps and services. 
Intertrust Media Solutions provides robust content protection solutions for media and entertainment. Intertrust ExpressPlay consists of a cloud-based multi-DRM service, broadcast TV security, and anti-piracy services with proven scalability in the largest OTT streaming platforms globally. 
ExpressPlay DRM is today’s most complete multi-DRM monetization service for OTT streaming, supporting Apple FairPlay Streaming, Google Widevine, Microsoft PlayReady, Adobe Primetime, and the open-standard Marlin DRM. Intertrust also offers ExpressPlay DRM Offline to enable secure streaming of premium content through an offline multi-DRM platform. 
Founded in 1990, Intertrust is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with regional offices in London, Tokyo, Mumbai, Bangalore, Beijing, Seoul, Riga, and Tallinn.

The post How to Trust Your Player: Protecting Content from Origination to Playback appeared first on Bitmovin.

• Alan Ogilvie, Lead Product Manager, Friend MTS
• Andy Wilson, Senior Product Architect, Friend MTS
• Chris O’Brien, Engineering Manager, Friend MTS

In the continually evolving OTT world, we’ve established that savvy pirates are implementing new and advanced methods to steal valuable content – to the tune of more than $67 billion (USD) in value by 2023. Another report from ABI Research estimates that more than 17% of worldwide video streaming users access content illegally.
We also know that launching an OTT service is costly, resource-intensive, and complicated. Getting it right is critical. Beyond building the video consumption environment and content acquisition, companies must incorporate up-to-date content protection methods. In this “How to Trust Your Player” series, we’ve learned about Digital Rights Management (DRM) from Intertrust Technologies, and about content packaging, license acquisition models – and best practices for implementation within the video player environment from Bitmovin. 

Understanding Content Protection

But what about the other players? They are the users, the consumers of all this valuable content. To ensure content protection among these players, we have to look at watermarking. Working together with OTT services throughout the world, we have seen how companies are working hard to protect their content at the front end with DRM, but are not commonly implementing readily accessible, advanced watermarking techniques to protect the content once it reaches the end user.
As a result, they are risking subscriber loyalty, growth, and revenue by not covering the last hole in the content delivery system. This scenario is one case where the overused “end-to-end” term is applicable: OTT companies must protect their content end to end in order to truly protect their content and revenue.

Protection Beyond DRM

So what’s an OTT service provider to do?
We know that DRM is absolutely necessary in this journey, and needs careful, considered implementation. As Intertrust pointed out in its article, “Securing Content Access with Digital Rights Management Best Practices”, recommended DRM best practices are essential to: 

• Maintain a secure interface for delivery of content keys to the encoder and packagers;
• Secure session tokens for authentication and authorisation;
• Prevent attacks against the DRM license acquisition servers;
• Make sure only verified browsers and players can access the media and DRM license in different devices.

A default option for any premium content service provider, DRM is designed to protect audio/video content during transit to the consumer’s player. As discussed in the above-mentioned article, DRM manages the robust content encryption key exchange between the secured playback device (the player) and the license service. DRM is also responsible for setting usage policies for the content, and for enforcing this within the playback environment. However, once the material has started playing, a new threat emerges – the consumer. A common misconception is that playback devices are secure.  
DRM can do little to isolate pirated content, or identify the wrongdoers, when content is stolen and made freely available. Once content arrives at its intended legitimate destination, DRM can do nothing to stop it from being redistributed by those who have no rights to do so. The crux of the problem is that DRM protects only the legitimate path from origination to the point of consumption.

See “Beyond DRM: The Complete Content Protection Story,” for further details.
It’s also important to understand that practices to curb sharing and theft of credentials (such as passwords) do not help reduce the distribution of content once it has escaped the boundaries of a video service.
In short, DRM is a key part of any rigorous approach to piracy defence. But if we want to talk about end-to-end protection, there’s more.

Enter Video Watermarking

To protect the value of video content – whether original or rights-managed – outside of these legitimate service boundaries, you’ll need to identify the video itself. Specifically, you’ll need information to confirm its outermost point of legitimate use. With that, you can identify the “bad actors”: the infringing users and industrial-scale pirates. 
To accomplish this, video providers can embed information into the video itself, at the point of origin, in the Content Distribution Network (CDN) during distribution, or within the player device. Information might include the device IP address, session details, and subscriber identifier.
The most effective way to do it? Client-composited (client-side) watermarking. It’s clever, as consumers can’t see the watermarks. Only automated analysis can. 
Client‑composited watermarking occurs within the consumer device. The embedded player accesses a software library database that replies with a unique identifier. The watermark information is converted into a pattern, similar in concept to a QR code, and then is “composited” with the video via an overlay.

Source: Friend MTS. Image source: frames from (CC) Blender Foundation 
Client-composited watermarking is fast. Time to detection of content theft can be as little as a few seconds – important for any service, but particularly so for live sporting events. It’s also lower in cost than other watermarking options, such as A/B watermarking. 
For a more thorough discussion of watermarking  methods, their advantages and disadvantages, see our “Subscriber Watermarking Technologies – White Paper Quick Facts.”

Best Practices in Video Watermarking: Detect, Deter, Disable

No matter which way you go with watermarking, you must keep the end goals in mind: to deter piracy, detect it when it occurs, and disable the source of the pirated content. The truth is that embedding watermarks alone is not very helpful unless there is a way to use the watermarks to find stolen video content, identify its source, and take appropriate action. Herein lies the hallmark of a robust watermarking solution.
Detecting involves monitoring suspected pirate outlets, and then matching the digital “fingerprint” of a suspected piece of content with a reference fingerprint that generates during the production process. Then, advanced watermarking analysis can see the identifying watermark and extract the information that it contains.
Determent is about defending against pirate “attacks.” To reduce the chances that an instance of stolen content could be traced back to its last legitimate distribution end point (or to the pirates themselves), content thieves may try to make the watermark unreadable by applying “transformations” to the content. These “attacks” make the watermark no longer available or readable. However, a strong, advanced watermarking program has a far better chance of surviving these attacks and remaining readable.
Disabling is about treating the incident after determining the identity of a pirated video stream. This can include direct actions against the pirate, ranging from take-down notices to reporting to law enforcement. Typically, video providers take actions against subscribers whose accounts they detect to be restreaming. Those actions might be interrupting the session, requiring the user to re-enter access credentials, suspending the end user’s account, disallowing the use of the device on the account, or even initiating legal action.

Choosing a Watermarking Service

What do you want from your watermarking service? What should you want from your watermarking service?
Deployment
How widely deployed is the service? How many set-top boxes and OTT players is it securing around the globe? In the OTT world, and in the content protection world, experience does count. Make sure you are getting a system with a proven, demonstrable track record in detecting, deterring and disabling piracy across multiple illegal redistribution channels. 
Strength against attacks
OTT players need to choose a watermarking service that is effective. How effective? Ask the provider for details. At Friend MTS, we know that our Advanced Subscriber Identification (ASiD) service has remained secure against every attack made to date in both broadcast and OTT environments.
Keep in mind that staying abreast of attacks is a constantly changing process. Your watermarking provider has to not only keep up with the latest pirate schemes, but stay ahead of them. Those bad actors are clever, and don’t always appear “bad” on the surface. In general, they use a legitimate subscription and easily available screen recording software for screen scraping – or even $10 (USD) switches that can remove HDCP. Commercial pirate distributors can easily capture video output, then re-encode and redistribute the premium video using their own infrastructure to monetise stolen content.
Fragmentation of content – which happens when consumers need to subscribe to more than one streaming service to get access to all the content they want to watch – makes it even harder for legitimate content owners and providers to compete with illegal subscription services. These pirate content aggregators, not restricted by licensing agreements, monetise stolen content by offering the end user a one-stop shop for the best sports and entertainment programming. 
Be sure the service you are considering is highly adaptable to ever-evolving pirate attacks.
Speed
As explained, client-composited watermarking will provide the fastest identification of piracy. If you’re dealing with live sports and entertainment, pay-per-view, and on-demand content, this factor should play an important part in your decision on the type of watermarking system to deploy. Think about it in these terms: Several years ago, a major broadcaster – the original source for 60% of the sports channel piracy in its market – introduced ASiD. OTT piracy reduced to less than 1% within weeks.
Global reach
With today’s technology and the speed of the Internet, OTT players will need to protect content in markets throughout the world. Even if you are servicing customers in one country or on one continent, remember that content thieves can and do act without physical borders.
Multi-CDN service
Some watermarking mechanisms may incur additional charges to support multi-CDN usage. Since OTT services have enough expense and complexity, know that it is possible to find a robust service that incurs no additional expenses for multi-CDN content delivery.
Every OTT operator will have its own criteria, but the bottom line is to carefully select a watermarking service that is cost-effective and results-driven. 

Understanding the Human Factor

One of the most challenging aspects of securing an OTT service is the understanding of the human factor in content protection: the end-users who are consuming content.
It is essential to start at a level of zero trust, assuming that some users of your service will attempt to circumvent security controls or use your service in a way you didn’t intend. This could mean something as simple as sharing their credentials with family or friends, or a more direct attack against your content security systems by bypassing/overcoming licensing restrictions.
To overcome this challenge, understand that the point of zero trust begins as early as sign-up for your service. Protection steps include validation of the presented user profile, location checks, payment fraud detection (such as comparison with other existing users), and enforcement of a suitably complex password with multi-factor authentication to prevent brute force attacks.

Video Viewer Personas

Errant or undesired behavior within your service can typically be broken down into the following personas.
The Over-Consumer
Running an OTT service is expensive. The cost of delivering compressed video to your consumers is one of the most costly aspects, even with high competition driving CDN pricing down. Your service pricing and tiers model against costs, and per–user delivery/CDN cost – driven by view time per user session – is a major factor. Is a user’s consumption patterns far more than your predicted model suggests? That could indicate the “over-consumer”. 
The Frequent Mover
Here, an authenticated and authorised user’s sessions change IP addresses frequently in a short period of time, spanning multiple geographies. This is a good indication of a compromised account, with multiple users accessing the service unbeknown to the legitimate account holder.
The Account Sharer
The Account Sharer is characterised by multiple authentication authorisations over time, with different IP addresses/ISPs, and possibly different geographies. As with the Frequent Mover, this pattern could indicate a compromised account. But, it is also possible that a legitimate user has shared their credentials with friends and family – or worse, with a much wider group.  
The Out-of-Bounds Viewer
In this case, the user viewing the content is outside of a designated geographic area. Initial authorisation attempts may have been genuine, but other data sources may reveal the user’s true location.
The Anonymous IP Viewer
The Anonymous IP Viewer’s traffic comes from a suspected or known, proxy/VPN, or a suspect network source (i.e. cloud infrastructure vendor, rather than ISP).
The Long Viewer
This user watches only live channels, for very long periods in one session. 
The Tamperer
The Tamperer’s session data indicates tampering with the playback environment Tamper warnings from the code obfuscation solution may have fired. Session token data mismatches may have been logged. You may also see multiple authorisation attempts, and multiple content license request attempts for a single-use token.
From sign-up forward, every component within your service should provide user behaviour monitoring to aid in the identification of patterns that could indicate fraudulent or suspicious activity. This analysis is important to protect your interests under the terms of your content licensing deals – and critically important for revenue protection.

Using Watermarks for End-to-End Protection

To combat the increasing number of piracy attacks, OTT services must implement solid watermarking and detection as well as DRM. There’s a lot at stake: content, revenue, and brand – and even investment in the delivery infrastructure of systems, software, operations, and technical support.
Start by developing and enhancing understanding of the full content protection strategy, and continue with following the considerations and best practices we’ve outlined to choose and implement a watermarking service. Only then can you make sure that your players – from one end to the other – are as trustworthy as the technology you’ve implemented.
Check out the corresponding fireside chat:

Visit How to Trust Your Player

Check out the full blog series below:

• How To Trust Your Player #1 – Tips from the Top: Secure Content Delivery and Playback
• How to Trust Your Player #2: Securing Content Access with DRM Best Practices by Intertrust
• How to Trust Your Player #3: How to Secure Your Content in Challenging Streaming Environments
• How to Trust Your Player #5: Protecting Content from Origination to Playback

View the webinar on the How to Trust Your Player Page
Download this article as a PDF
Download the full series as a PDF
_________________________________________________________________
How To Trust Your Player is a collaborative effort between Bitmovin, Friend MTS and Intertrust. Our goal is to educate media and content providers on the importance of delivering streaming content in the most secure ways possible from the video player to the end-consumer while protecting both their content and revenue. 

The post How to Trust Your Player #4: Beyond DRM – Video Watermarking appeared first on Bitmovin.

• PNG, JPG, GIF and BMP
• set exact position in the video
• automatic scaling with your encoding profile resolutions

If your are missing a feature in our watermarking that is needed for your business we are happy to help you just drop us a line!

How to add Watermarks to Video: Watermarking Config

The watermarking configuration is part of the encoding profile which also contains the video and audio stream configurations. Applying a watermark configuration on the encoding profile will overlay all video streams with the specified watermark image on the position as specified. The position of the image in pixels can be specified via the ‘top’, ‘bottom’, ‘left’ and ‘right’ parameters of the watermark configuration. Only one horizontal and one vertical distance parameter is allowed. The following is an example which uses the top and left parameter to define the position of the image in the video:

"watermarkConfig": {
    "top": 10,
    "left": 100,
    "image": "https://your.server/watermark.png"
}

You can find more information about the encoding profile in general and encoding profiles with watermarks in our developer section.

API Client Examples

Our API clients also contain examples for watermarking such as the Python API client. Just take a look at the create_job_with_watermark.py example. In the example an encoding profile is created with 4 different video resolutions and bitrates as well as an audio representation with 192Kbps. Additionally, we have added a watermark configuration to the encoding profile, shown in the excerpt below:

watermark_config = bitcodin.WatermarkConfig(
    image_url='https://bitdash-a.akamaihd.net/webpages/bitcodin/images/bitcodin_transparent_50_1600.png',
    top=191,
    right=159
)
encoding_profile_obj = bitcodin.EncodingProfile(
    name='API Test Profile',
    video_stream_configs=video_configs,
    audio_stream_configs=audio_configs,
    watermark_config=watermark_config
)

The watermark configuration points to a PNG image and sets the position through the top and right attribute. The PNG is transparent and will be inserted in the middle of the video stream. You can try out this example easily by inserting your API key on the top and simply executing it on the command line with python create_job_with_watermark.py.

Add watermarks to Video Streams streams with Bitmovin for free

If you want to watermark your MPEG-DASH and HLS content, you can use our Bitmovin encoding service with a free plan with 2.5GB encoding output per month. That’s great for testing and playing around with our watermarking feature!
For more information on how to add watermark to your video try our support section.

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