Anti-piracy moves to the edge: watermarking without A/B bloat

Synamedia introduced ContentArmor Edge Watermarking, a forensic watermarking solution that inserts session-specific watermarks directly into the compressed stream at the CDN edge to help detect and disrupt piracy. The company claims the approach halves watermark insertion and extraction times versus A/B watermarking and reduces origin-to-edge and cache bandwidth, targeting an end-to-end disruption time of under five minutes. The solution is positioned as avoiding A/B dual-asset caching by encoding once at the headend and inserting unique identifiers per session on the fly at the edge despite constraints like limited CPU and lack of DRM keys on edge servers.