The OTT system is growing fast but it is deluged with piracy attempts from all over the world. Pirates mount sophisticated attacks on streaming video platforms to steal proprietary premium content to make money on the dark web.
Content owners use two different types of forensic watermarking methods on DRM protected content to catch the thieves among their user groups. These imperceptible watermarking solutions are client-side watermarking and server-side watermarking. In the first category, the client device or player is targeted. Such a device may include set-top boxes, OTT applications, like those of Netflix and Amazon Prime, smartphones or tablets, desktop browsers, smart TVs, or even gaming consoles. Theoretically it is possible to protect content being played on even car or airplane monitors. On the other hand, the server-side forensic watermarking approach targets the video asset lying in the server.
The client-side watermarking becomes even more relevant for live sporting events. This is the most preferred form of video watermarking technology on big sporting days. Even when experts consider a method more prone to hacking in comparison to the server-side watermarking, producers prefer this method because of the ease of extraction it offers. If a copyright or streaming rights owner cannot quickly identify the illegal user and distributor of its official content, it gives no value to them, since the revenue is to be maximized while the event is still on.
While it offers ease of insertion and extraction, the client-side watermarking can also become ineffective if the developer does not take care to obfuscate its code. If the hacker can read the code, it can easily reverse-engineer and block the watermark insertion process, thus defeating the whole purpose of employing a watermarking technology. At the samt time, there can be leakage at the level of the device. Not all devices can be protected with the same code. The developer should keep in mind to use device- or operating-system-specific code to have a foolproof arrangement in place.