Toward Real-Time Detection of Forensic Watermarks to Combat Piracy by Live Streaming

Abstract

Over the past several years, antipiracy analysts have documented the transition of casual content piracy away from Torrent networks to streaming sites that provide immediate access to not only live television (TV) broadcasts, but also file-based pirated content, such as movies and TV episodes. Because live content such as professional sports or pay-per-view events have only one release window, they will lose market value immediately if they can be streamed live, thus there is a recognized need to act quickly in the case of piracy and hence to shorten the time needed to extract the forensic watermark payload to as close to realtime as possible. In working toward inline detection of forensic watermarks from streaming content, we seek to enable a new tool designed to identify the pirate source in minutes. With the ability to detect a session-based forensic watermark directly from a video stream, it is possible for an operator to disable a set-top box or streaming client while the transmission is still in progress.