Synamedia has introduced an edge watermarking solution aiming to detect and disrupt content piracy. In what the company said is an industry first, ContentArmor Edge Watermarking inserts watermarks directly into the compressed stream at the CDN edge, halving insertion and extraction times and bringing end-to-end disruption time beneath five minutes.
Additionally, bandwidth is reduced between the origin and edge servers, and within the edge server caches, lowering infrastructure requirements, said the company.
Overcoming technical constraints such as limited CPU capacity and the absence of DRM encryption keys on edge server, Edge Watermarking removes the need for reliance on A/B watermarking, where two versions of encrypted content are cached in the CDN with unique, scrambled sequences of segments served to each user. Instead, the solution encodes the content once at the headend and distributes it through the CDN before a unique identifier is inserted for each session on the fly. The watermark is extracted faster than A/B watermarking thanks to a higher bit density, said the company.
Commenting, Alain Durand, senior director at Synamedia, said, “This product is the result of a ten-year journey to make server-side forensic watermarking possible at the edge. Since Content Armor was founded in 2016, we understood the potential of edge watermarking, but it wasn’t technically feasible or scalable until now. As the only provider offering server-side watermarking in the compressed bitstream, together with Synamedia’s CDN expertise, we have overcome technical challenges, integrated watermarking directly with the CDN for the first time, and achieved the scalability needed to support live streaming.”
