Payal Kapoor

Content protection technology and content protection systems are essential for both TV OEMs and broadcasters since without it, studios won’t agree to license their content. Yet, deploying such technology may present significant financial and business challenges. All pay-TV operators want to reduce operating costs while preparing for a transition to more flexible cloud-based services. Here are some of the core objectives with direct-to-TV broadcasting and converged content protection technology. ...

The Golden Age of Streaming — the era that the Economist magazine is calling a “$650 Billion Binge” — is just starting. Shows like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and Transparent have ushered in a new generation of entertainment marked by its large numbers of international viewers and acclaimed programming. In 2019, subscriptions to online (OTT) video-on-demand services around the world amounted to 1,072,000, surpassing cable by far with 613.3 million subscribers. The OTT VOD subscriptions are ex...

When looking at digital rights management vendor, like any major vendor, one of the first things to investigate is how they’ve coped with similar clients. Not only will this give an insight into how they go about their business but also how they deal with various enterprise sizes. Scalability is much talked about but hard to implement and finding a digital rights management vendor with proven abilities to scale up rapidly and meet live event user bursts is crucial. Intertrust’s experience with ...

Content piracy is so big that its impact is felt beyond the bank account — it’s changing business models. Traditionally in the movie business, new releases often stayed in theaters for months to maximize revenues. As digital downloads, and now streaming, have made it easier for content pirates to obtain and distribute illegal copies, movie studios have continually shrunk the release window over the last several years, moving to get their latest blockbuster online before pirates gain traction wit...

The most significant piracy ecosystem threat today comes from an open software platform that operates under the Kodi brand. Kodi is a completely legal initiative and can be installed on various devices to deliver a unified experience, similar to Chromecast or Apple TV, but without the restrictions imposed by those systems. Unsurprisingly, the ease-of-use and popularity of Kodi boxes translate to Kodi accounting for 95% of the illegal live consumption in North America. In our blog post An Anti-P...

In the world of live sports watermarking, speed is king, and that applies to video watermarking as well. The key advantage to ASiD OTT client-composited watermarking for use in live sports is its speed. Time to detection of content theft can be as little as a few seconds. With current technology, organisations involved in the broadcast of live sports must protect content worldwide, in real time (remember that content thieves act without physical borders). In contrast, A/B variant video watermar...

This approach enables OTT drm streaming service providers to grant access to content distributed to different customers/different devices by delivering only the DRM licenses with CEKs for the authorized resolutions based on the consumer’s subscription package. Also, this allows the streaming service operator to fine-tune the DRM policies for each given resolution or track. For example, audio and SD content may not require enforcement of HDCP over an HDMI connection. However, an HD resolution ma...

Session-based and user-specific video watermarking enables the service operator to embed a unique identifier for each user. The ID is then used to trace any unauthorized redistribution of premium content. This technique is a critical anti-piracy tool to protect UHD premium content and live events broadcasting since it is possible to identify the actual device that is “leaking” or restreaming the content. This anti-piracy strategy allows for real-time detection of the source of pirated content an...

Conditional access systems work by requiring certain criteria to be met before granting a user access to the content. Here’s a closer look at how conditional access systems work. The broadcaster (for example, the pay-TV operator) encrypts their content and provides subscribers with the means to decrypt it via their set-top boxes (STB) aided by some CA-specific messages. As the world becomes more digital, rights holders and content producers face new challenges when it comes to monetizing their...

Digital rights management is the technology that is used to protect and monetize intellectual property and copyrighted materials from misuse or theft in the digital sphere. The two core objectives of digital rights management are data protection and data governance.  Traditionally, digital content has been protected with encryption. A digital rights management (DRM) system, using a secret key, encrypts content to make it unwatchable so that only somebody who has the key can decrypt and watch it...