Digital Rapids, Civolution Expand Watermarking Deal

Sports PPV and VOD providers have a new security option as Digital Rapids has integrated Civolution’s NexGuard PayTV & Online watermark pre-processing technology with its StreamZ and StreamZHD studio encoding systems. The companies say the technologies together enable content watermarking and transformation in a single workflow step for delivery through over-the-top (OTT) video-on-demand (VoD) services. The use of video watermarking on a per-VOD-transaction opens up new opportunities for early-release of premium content.

The new support complements Digital Rapids’ existing support for Civolution’s NexGuard – Pre-Release forensic watermarking technology. That relationship enables content owners to secure high-value content during the production, post-production, and pre-release distribution stages of the media life cycle.

“We are pleased to expand our support for Civolution watermarking technology with the addition of NexGuard – PayTV & Online,” says Brick Eksten, President, Digital Rapids. “The combination of our solutions enables exceptionally efficient workflows for content encoding and watermarking. Per-transaction watermarking will ultimately benefit consumers, who should be able to enjoy content such as movies at home in earlier release windows.”

Civolution’s NexGuard technology applies a unique identification number upon streaming the content to connected TVs, PCs, tablets or game consoles used in OTT VoD services. The imperceptible watermark introduces a deterrent against content theft and provides movie studios with the expected level of content security to deliver premium HD content on an early-release window.

“The combination of NexGuard watermark pre-processing with Digital Rapids’ encoding solutions further benefits from Digital Rapids’ experience in transforming content for the adaptive bit rate streaming methods used in OTT VoD services,” says Jean-Michel Masson, SVP Watermarking Solutions at Civolution. “Content can now be delivered from streaming servers or CDN edge servers with on-the-fly watermarking.”

The combined solution leverages Digital Rapids’ high-quality H.264 encoding, efficient workflow automation and simultaneous multiple-bitrates output capabilities for adaptive streaming.  The new integration of NexGuard – PayTV & Online is incorporated into a software upgrade for StreamZ and StreamZHD.

Civolution’s NexGuard watermarking solutions for PayTV and VoD content are deployed in millions of consumer settop boxes and TV sets used in hospitality markets. NexGuard video watermarking solutions provide a strong deterrent against piracy, helping to protect content delivered through VoD services. The NexGuard technology adds imperceptible video watermarks – on a per content copy basis – which are resilient to analog/digital conversion, format change, (re)compression and various other forms of content manipulation. Additionally Civolution offers an automated web-based detection service to support studios, digital cinemas and VoD distributors in tracing sources of illegal copies. The straightforward and secure service allows for “blind detection,” without the need for any reference video.