Toward Real-Time Detection of Forensic Watermarks to Combat Piracy by Live Streaming

Over the past several years, anti-piracy analysts have documented the transition of casual content piracy away from Torrent networks to streaming sites which provide immediate access to not only live TV broadcasts, but also file-based pirated content, such as movies and TV episodes. — Since Live Content such as professional sports or Pay Per View events have only one release window, they will lose market value immediately if they can be streamed live, thus there is a recognized need to act quickly in the case of piracy and hence to shorten the time needed to extract the forensic watermark payload to as close to real-time as possible. — In working toward inline detection of forensic watermarks from streaming content, we seek to enable a new tool designed to identify the pirate source in minutes. With the ability to detect a session-based forensic watermark directly from a video stream, it is possible for an operator to disable a set-top box or streaming client while the transmission is still in progress.

Published

2014-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

Forensic watermarking, piracy, content monitoring, live streaming

DOI

10.5594/M001587

ISBN

978-1-61482-954-6