Synamedia Debuts Edge Watermarking To Combat Piracy

Synamedia has introduced an edge watermarking solution designed to speed up the disruption of pirated video streams.

The ContentArmor Edge Watermarking tool inserts watermarks at the CDN edge, which the company says allows for faster detection of leaks and removal of pirated content while reducing infrastructure requirements. The solution is CDN-agnostic, with the first integration available for Synamedia Fluid EdgeCDN.

The server-side solution embeds unique watermarks directly into compressed streams. According to Synamedia, the technology cuts insertion and extraction times in half, reducing end-to-end session disruption time to less than five minutes. The speed is considered critical for protecting live sports and other high-value events.

The approach also aims to streamline delivery and cut costs for VOD content by eliminating the need for dual streams, which reduces bandwidth between origin and edge servers.

Historically, the industry relied on A/B watermarking, which requires caching two distinct versions of encrypted content. Synamedia’s new method encodes content once at the headend, with a lightweight agent inserting a unique identifier for each session at the edge.

“This product is the result of a 10-year journey to make server-side forensic watermarking possible at the edge,” Alain Durand, Synamedia senior director, said. “We understood the potential of edge watermarking, but it wasn’t technically feasible or scalable until now.”

Synamedia, a provider of video software, will demonstrate the technology at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, April 18-22.

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