When we reported on Nagra’s forensic watermarking deployment win at film festival platform provider Eventive last week, there were a handful of unanswered questions that we hoped a webinar this week would help clear up.
What it did do is provide a third perspective, as it turns out encoding vendor Bitmovin was involved in the deployment too, despite not making the cut in last week’s press release.
But first up, Faultline jumped straight in and quizzed Eventive co-founder Iddo Patt on whether Nagra’s forensic watermarking technology had resulted in any successful piracy track-downs. He revealed that Eventive recently had its first detection in the wild, one month after recruiting Nagra, from a film festival client who got in touch after a distributor noticed content had been shared.
“They were able to get us the file and we sent this over to the detection team at Nagra and immediately got a result that connected back the information. Not only username and credentials, but also IP address and ISP,” said Patt.
But against the backdrop of fighting piracy at scale, there is a case for forensic watermarking as a powerful deterrent which is seen by some as more effective than tracking down individual pirates. Eventive has not only embraced the deterrent approach in the form of warning messages before every screening so that viewers know there is an invisible watermark, but it has made this a mandatory feature.
“In one month, this was the first one we got which was really encouraging. We don’t want people to rip anything at all, but it’s great when they are caught when they do – especially small festivals,” added Patt.
It is testament to the scale Eventive has achieved over the past year that it has broken down the cost barrier of implementing advanced security systems, which has enabled it to offer Nagra forensic watermarking at no extra cost. Covid-19 was of course the direct inspiration behind this, triggering hypergrowth in the business as it grew 10-fold – ingesting some 50,000 individual pieces of content in 2020 and registering 2 million audience members across individual screenings. This type of scale required implementation of a more robust anti-piracy strategy, for which watermarking was the natural choice.
Unfortunately, panelists were not forthcoming on the details of how Nagra and Bitmovin are making money from a service that is offered completely free.
Providing the compression perspective was Bitmovin’s Product Manager, Markus Hafellner, who presented Bitmovin’s split and stitch approach to speeding up encoding processes. This differs from a typical linear-type encoder from a hardware box that goes about compressing content in its entirety, as Bitmovin splits content into small chunks that are processed in parallel. Split and stitch can be a challenge to integrate, but is being promoted as an architecture that premium content benefits greatly from, as content is processed in almost 100x real-time, explained Hafellner.
How this ties into security is because the encoder creates segments with watermark A and B, in preparation for a player requesting segments sequentially, from where the CDN then sends a random combination of A and B segments.
Hafellner described this as almost like creating a DNA sequence with watermarking. For example:
Customer 1 – ABAB
Customer 2 – ABBA
Customer 3 – BBBA
“The beauty of a software encoder is that it makes it super easy. Integration time has gone down significantly,” he added.
For a ballooning company like Eventive, one that is a direct product of our year-old virtual world, it realized right away that security was key to scaling. At the time of launch in March 2020, Eventive rolled out security-grade DRM which was great initially, but having more than 850 distributors and studios signing up, with so much content all in one place, Eventive was becoming an attractive lure for piracy.
Eventive even launched its very own Advanced Antipiracy Technology for virtual cinema, claiming to be the most rigorous and affordable content security program for film streaming. We understand the Advanced Antipiracy Technology breakthrough was developed separately of a third-party security specialist like Nagra.
Now, every virtual screening on Eventive VoD is secured with a Nagra NexGuard invisible forensic watermark, identifying each individual user and session. From a relative nobody to deploying one of the most advanced anti-piracy technologies on the planet in under a year is still – as we get to grips with companies experiencing hypergrowth – an almost unfathomable feat.