Medialive Integrates Cinea’s Running Marks™ with Launch Of m2mark® To Reinforce Content Protection from Source to End-User Devices.
Medialive, a leading digital content protection company, announced its launch of a new SDK product range: m2mark®, which features a highly secure approach to merging forensic watermarking and DRM/CAS technologies. The solution integrates Running Marks™, a forensic watermarking technology licensed from Cinea, Inc., a subsidiary of Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (NYSE: DLB). The collaboration enables customers to benefit from these security features provided by the newly developed technologies.
A unique element of the new m2mark® system is that the watermarks are added while the content is still scrambled, so that clear content always contains the watermark. The in-depth integration of Running Marks with the Medialive technology brings an easy-to-deploy and cost-effective solution that reinforces the content protection from source to end-user devices.
The Medialive digital content protection technology consists in extracting the most pertinent data (about 1%) from the original bitstream, at random positions chosen from a set of relevant locations, and replaces this data with pseudo-random dummy data, while keeping altogether the compliance according to the native format and the size of the bitstream. The newly created content is called the “self-protected content” and it can be super-distributed on any type of distribution system (web portals, P2P networks, physical media support, etc.) and can be played back by any device implementing a standard multimedia codec (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, etc.).
“From the start we designed Running Marks for flexibility in order to work with a wide range of system architectures and designs,” said Robert Schumann, general manager of Cinea, Inc. “We are very pleased that Medialive selected Running Marks as the forensic watermarking technology to integrate with their new m2mark® content security offering.”
The m2mark® solution is a key enabler of market trends: Web VOD, IPTV media emergence, HD content demand increase and new advertising models. Medialive’s unique combination of content protection and content identification allows: controlling content distribution, providing content owners with technical means to dissuade digital piracy and improving the user experience (being “imperceptible” to consumers) while being interoperable with existing DRM/CAS and tracking systems.
“We want our customers to have the best watermarking technology along with the best digital content protection system,” said Didier Lesteven, CEO of Medialive. “Running Marks uniquely separates mark creation, mark placement and mark insertion, resulting in imperceptible marks that are difficult for pirates to attack. This allows for mark insertion in a broad range of consumer playback devices, multiple insertions during content distribution and insertion within the perimeter of the security system. The intrinsic combination of Running Marks and m2mark® is one of the first true solutions addressing existing content distribution security leaks from source to consumer devices. These key features are widely required by the market and rights holders.”
Video forensic watermarking (or session-based watermarking) is the embedding of an imperceptible and unique identifier in a video stream with the intent to later recover those marks. Watermarking acts as an active enforcement tool against piracy by enabling content owners to track pirated content back to its source and as a deterrent by keeping honest people honest.
About Medialive
Medialive’s solutions are based on a breakthrough innovative and patented technology enabling secure digital content distribution over Internet and all telecom environments. This technology provides a unique approach combining DRM/CAS and watermarking technologies that enables simultaneously digital content protection and traceability. Specifically designed for the audiovisual world, the Medialive solutions provide the perfect answer to rights holders’ constraints and end-users’ expectations, while promoting the convergence of Pay-TV, IPTV and VOD business models. Medialive’s shareholders include Techfund (SEL) and Sprint-Nextel Communications Inc, the third largest US mobile network.
Medialive, a leading digital content protection company, and Nagravision a Kudelski Group (SWX:KUD.VX) and the leading provider of content protection and value-added service technology, developed a new solution combining Medialive m2mark(R) and Nagravision’s Conditional Access System. This technical collaboration illustrates a promising future for innovative Pay-TV and digital content security systems.
At IBC 2008 on Nagravision booth 1D69, Medialive and Nagravision are demonstrating the innovative results of their collaboration: an experimental pay-TV service protection architecture which explores future paradigms for content protection and distribution. A unique element of the new m2mark(R) system(1) is that the watermarks are added while the content is still scrambled, so that clear content always contains the watermark. The demonstration shows an original scrambling usage, which allows using only a small part of audio/video bit stream in a light watermarking & decryption process in a secure device.
Decryption and individual watermarking are simultaneously done in the secure device for improved security from source to end-user devices. “This prototype demonstrates how new technologies pioneered in emerging content distribution networks could enhance the traditional scrambling and CA architecture typically used in digital satellite and cable TV deployments.” said Christophe Nicolas, Chief Technology Officer of Nagravision.
This unique combination of content protection and content identification allows: controlling content distribution, providing service providers with additional technical means to dissuade new forms of digital Pay-TV piracy and improving the user experience (being “invisible” to consumers) while being interoperable with leading CAS and tracking systems as well as emerging copy protection solutions, such as Nagravision’s Persistent Rights Management (PRM).
“The new m2mark(R)-based solution allows smoothly bridging content protection technologies with content tracking technologies, while keeping intact the robustness of each independent solution, thus enabling a smart handover from protection to tracking” said Didier Lesteven, CEO of Medialive.” Moreover, it represents a key enabler of market trends: Web VOD, IPTV media emergence, HD content demand increase and new advertising models.”
Key aspects of the m2mark® are:
Content super-distribution: The lured media preserves the original format, so it can be super-distributed through any existing infrastructures with no changes (P2P and cellular networks, web, DVD etc.) and can be consumed by any device equipped with a player compliant with international standards in the field of multimedia coding for video (MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, etc.) and audio (MP3, AAC, etc.).
Content traceability on each level of the content distribution chain: The same protected content can be watermarked on each level of the content distribution chain (rights holders, content distributors and consumers) providing a flexible fraud detection system and dissuading the consumers to illegally use the content.
Multi-DRM: The same protected content can be consumed on various devices with different DRM/CAS capabilities by acquiring a Control_Object_Marker through the supported DRM/CAS system. Thus, the content sharing on user’s devices, as well as unified DRM/CAS platforms on the service provider’s side, becomes reality.
Richer marketing services: The lured media can be protected in a scalable way, allowing fine-grained preview features, as well as advertising campaigns. These features stimulate the users into exchanging the content between them, thus enabling the viral marketing.
Reinforced security on client side: The lured media is watermarked in the same time when descrambled, implying that the content is never present on the client side in a non-protected and non-watermarked form. In addition, Even if a terminal has been hacked, the terminal itself has no way to tell watermarking data apart from the rest of the data received in the Control_Object_Marker data.
Lighter resource consumption on the client side: Protecting with cryptographic methods only 4% of the content instead of 100% brings important advantages for real-time applications, like live broadcast, or when deploying protection systems on low-resources platforms, like mobile phones, music players, etc.
Flexible integration on client/server side: The system architecture allows re-using the existing DRM/CAS systems. The server-side module can be integrated before any DRM/CAS function is applied. The client-side module may be integrated directly into the multimedia player decoder, without disturbing the DRM/CAS deployed architecture.
