Irdeto says watermarking must survive collusion and CDN leeching
Irdeto published an article detailing the essential requirements for modern forensic watermarking at scale, emphasizing imperceptibility, robustness, and reliable detection in real-world piracy scenarios. The piece highlights A/B watermarking and Uniform Switching Identities (U-SWIDs) as practical implementation methods for large-scale OTT environments, addressing challenges like CDN leeching, partial signal loss, and collusion. It concludes that effective watermarking must integrate into a broader anti-piracy workflow for monitoring, detection, identification, and enforcement.
Key Takeaways
- Irdeto says production-grade watermarking needs imperceptibility, robustness and reliable detection to work on real leaks.
- A/B watermarking uses two segment variants, A and B, to create a unique identity at the headend without storing a separate asset for every viewer.
- U-SWIDs give each bit equal statistical significance, which Irdeto says improves attribution under partial signal loss and works well for CDN and edge environments.
- The article cites collusion resistance as a core requirement and says Irdeto research showed strong results with 25 colluders in a user base of 1 million.
- Irdeto TraceMark is positioned as part of a broader workflow spanning monitoring, early leak detection, identification and enforcement.
Why It Matters
The immediate implication is that watermarking for premium OTT services has to work in degraded, real-world piracy conditions, not just in lab tests. Irdeto frames the problem as one of attribution at scale, where A/B watermarking and U-SWIDs must remain usable after re-encoding, screen capture and collusion. That ties watermarking directly into a larger anti-piracy stack, including monitoring, early leak detection, evidence collection and enforcement. The specific signal to watch is whether watermark recovery remains reliable when only part of the embedded identity is available, especially in CDN and edge deployments.
Read full article at irdeto.dsmn8.com
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