35 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE AWS Elemental
DOWN THE LINE, THE IDEAL WILL BE THAT ALL CONTENT GETS WATERMARKED
burned into the content, but the effectiveness of the technique is limited. Pirates often remove or blur such logos or crop the video before restreaming the content, and some content doesn’t bear a broadcaster logo at all. The second level of watermarking is subscriber identification or ASID (Advanced Subscriber ID). With ASID watermarking the watermark is inserted into the content at the set-top box or the OTT player app. This enables Friend MTS to automatically identify which individual subscriber is illegally copying and/or restreaming. “Watermarks also have to be robust, tamper-proof and resistant to all sorts of attacks,” explains Hanna, “That’s where, over the next few years, these systems are going to be stressed quite heavily. We’re in a world right now where for pirates there are alternative sources. If a pirate identifies that a particular platform is now watermarking all of its content, they’re probably not going to try to work around it. They’ll just find it elsewhere where it’s not watermarked.
the week, we capture a lot more than other days of the week. On a Saturday, when all the sports are on, we do a lot more business than on a Tuesday night.” Through Friend MTS’ partnership with AWS, content owners can add watermarking to their content through AWS Elemental MediaConvert. This integration is designed for on-demand content, but Friend MTS is working on a solution for live OTT streaming too which should be imminently available through AWS Media Live. The watermark insertion is a free add-on for AWS customers. “If people come to us and want us to help because people are stealing their content, we can ask ‘Is it watermarked?’. If it is, we can go and find it, and identify where it’s coming from, straight away.”
“Down the line, the ideal will be that all content gets watermarked, at which point things will escalate and pirates will try to fight the watermarking, either by disabling or masking it or doing something to compromise its effectiveness . We’re trying to pre-empt that by putting lots of work into hardening our solutions and technologies.” WATCHING FROM THE CLOUD Friend MTS has just completed migration of its in-house technology to the cloud and now delivers all its services through AWS, including its API’s for monitoring and capture, as well as services for fingerprinting and watermarking. “The cloud is scalable and flexible. Certain days of
feedzine feed.zine feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook