Prime Focus Technologies announces that it has secured a patent for its Just-in-Time Watermarking solution within CLEAR from the United States Patent and Trademark Office – U.S. Patent No. 10,904,595.
The studios and content owners rely on invisible watermarks (commonly referred to as forensic watermarks). This is because there is no technology that converts content immediately for applying the visual user watermark without damaging the user experience. As these are traceable at the time of the leak, they couldn’t stop such leaks from happening. Hence, the trust in UI over-lay-based, visual watermarks. Though, these can be hacked.
The patented solution has two main innovations: (1) the ability to apply user-specific burnt-in watermarks, real-time and (2) make the experience of a “Just-In-Time-Watermarked” stream as seamless as that of a CLEAN stream. The invention treats each streaming-segment request from a user’s video player, as an atomic segment that will be needed to be translated by a GPU-farm and handed back immediately to the player. In conformance with the needs of the standard streaming protocols including HLS/DASH among others. In a conclusion:
– Any segment requested, across any bit rate, is served with a watermark and
– Any high-speed trick-play request (up to 3X) is served elegantly since it relies on high-speed transcodes through the GPU farm.
“Piracy has been and continues to heavily impact our industry at the world-wide level. Such an invention now provides studios and content owners the ability to protect their pre-release content through strong and reliable deterrence mechanisms that are embedded within their streaming infrastructures” said Ramki Sankaranarayanan, Founder and Global CEO, Prime Focus Technologies. “With Cloud costs continuing to drop and GPUs becoming even more affordable, it is a matter of time when the industry will decide to provide streaming URLs to their content-partners and vendors, instead of creating copies of content, individually watermarked for their use.
