(and how we stop them)
By William del Strother, VP of Innovation, FMTS
In a fast-changing piracy landscape, it’s critical to anticipate what could be around the corner. Our watermarking specialists are using the latest AI techniques and automation to keep our customers prepared to prevent pirate sabotage and any attempts to remove watermarks from content.
Here are some of the techniques pirates have up their sleeves:
- The easiest way for pirates to remove most watermarks is to aggressively downscale the video, sacrificing video quality to destroy the watermark. To counter this, our FMTS forensic watermarking solution was designed from the outset to handle poor quality video, heavy compression, and downsampling. This ensures the watermarking remains effective even when the video is degraded to an unwatchable quality.
- Another approach is collusion. Pirates meld the stream from two different subscriber accounts, making it almost impossible to extract the watermark. However, our experts overcome this challenge by detecting watermarks for both subscriptions, allowing the broadcaster to quickly take down both accounts.
- Pirates also attempt to circumvent watermarks by manipulating video using transforms such as cropping, padding, or flipping. Our watermarking solution can detect these actions, correct them, and still extract the pirate subscribers’ identities.
- While the days of video cameras recording films on the big screen are thankfully mostly behind us, the latest reincarnation sees smartphone users recording video off their TV to share on social media. Most of these users are unaware that this is illegal. Using AI, we have developed a way to extract the watermark from this second-hand video to allow the content owner to take actions such as presenting a warning to the user.
We've developed our watermarking solutions with a laser focus on speed and automation. As a result, when integrated with our global monitoring platform, customers can capture and identify pirate videos and extract the watermark in just minutes.
The next part of our blog series will examine how AI is gearing up for the next generation of threats, so stay tuned!
In the meantime, you can find out more about how we can help you trace pirates with our indelible watermarking techniques by contacting the team today.
Read the previous blog in the series, Is it fake or for real? Trusting the content we’re watching.
