Let us begin by understanding the impact of video piracy
- India has been ranked third in the list of highest contributors of visits to content piracy websites with over 7 billion visits through torrent sites in 2022.
- Globally, there has been a 21.9% increase in piracy sites visits in 2022 as compared to 2021, with the number of visits rising from 116.24 billion to 141.7 billion.
- Pirated video material gets over 230 billion views a year.
- More than 80% of global online piracy can be attributed to illegal streaming services.
- Digital video piracy is costing the US economy between $29.2 and $71 billion each year.
- 126.7 billion viewings worth of US-produced TV episodes are pirated every year
- Annual global revenue losses from digital piracy are between $40 and $97.1 billion in the movie industry.
- Illegal downloading of copyrighted materials takes up 24% of the global bandwidth.
Source : https://dataprot.net/statistics/piracy-statistics/
What is Watermarking ?
Watermarking provides a means of protecting content through identification. Visual content watermarks can either be visible or invisible. Watermarking is regarded as one of the most powerful solutions in the anti-piracy toolkit. For a watermarked stream its corresponding watermark is stored in a database, when a suspected leak is investigated its watermark is extracted and compared with the database to find the source(originator) of the leak. While Server-side Watermarking comes with its drawbacks(high compute overhead, maintaining two copies of content etc.) it is still considered safer than Client-side Watermarking as this technique requires embedding watermarks on the client device which can be compromised. We will discuss Client-side Watermarking techniques in a later blog, for this one we will focus on the Server-side techniques.
What are the two popular types of Watermarking ?
- A/B Watermarking
- Bitstream Watermarking
Let us discuss these two types briefly -
A/B Watermarking / A/B Switcher is a technique where the encoder/packager produces two different versions of each segment, the two video streams created are entirely similar to each other except for the watermark. These are then interleaved generally at the CDN layer(rarely client-side) - this provides the unique identifier to identify the source of theft. The content is watermarked at the encoder/transcoder, a unique manifest is created with a unique combination of segments from the two copies. A sophisticated pirate could create a new manifest(a combination of two manifests and video/audio segments) thereby breaking this method with a false unique copy for the detection engines.
Bitstream Watermarking is a Hollywood approved technique, done in a couple ways, considered quite secure and robust. This type of watermarking involves modification of pixels at the encoder. The Profiler(as shown in the diagram below) analyzes the bitstream to identify locations where watermark can be embedded. The Embedder embed the watermark using metadata computed by the profiler.
Note : Bitstream modifications have a high-compute overhead which makes it difficult to use this layer of protection for Live Video Streams, also has an impact on the latency of the steam which may not be suited for Low Latency applications.
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