The Covid-19 pandemic has increased the intensity of a viewership trend that started developing in the online video space five to six years back. The viewership of OTT platforms zoomed and it became a multi-billion-dollar industry with double digit growth happening every year.
However, the lockdown orders by governments in different parts of the world have brought focus on the practice of piracy, which also grew multifold. It is estimated that the piracy websites which host illegal movies attracted billions of views in 2020 when all that content was available on legitimate networks. And, websites are just one of the many ways to access pirated content.
Studios and OTT platforms got aggressive with digital rights management (DRM) in this period to increase compliance with legal contracts. They spend millions of dollars collectively to deliver DRM protected content to users securely. A survey has found that in the absence of an effective anti-piracy mechanism, the pay-TV and OTT industry could lose up to USD67 billion by 2023 worldwide. The websites and mobile apps hosting pirate content also make billions of dollars in an advertisement, which is a direct revenue leakage of legitimate OTT players.
A DRM approach can help OTT platforms take encrypted content to the user and authenticate their identity before it is decrypted for playback. However, pirates still manage to steal premium video content. To catch them once videos are pirated, content owners, employ video watermarking technology, also known as forensic watermarking technology. A watermarking tool, generally used in conjunction with the multi-DRM tool, embeds metadata in each video frame that is unique to the session, user, or device where the video is being played.
In the eventuality of a leak, the multi-DRM/watermarking vendor crawls the web for pirated copies, extracts watermark information from clips, and matches it against a database of watermarks created at the time of inserting the watermark. This watermark extraction process gives content owners the necessary information to take action against the user who leaked the original file to the piracy ecosystem.
0 responses to “Hollywood studios can prevent piracy increase in Covid times with forensic watermarks”