CDSA
Akamai Takes Content Protection to the Edge
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Akamai March 25 announced it has added additional watermarking partners to its content protection ecosystem, offering yet another level of service protection against piracy threats that cost the media and entertainment industry an estimated $29 billion a year.
Akamai’s Access Revocation solution — which gives rights holders the ability to quickly stop unauthorized video streams — now has the ability to use services like NAGRA watermarking and other solutions as part of the company’s “prevent-discover-enforce” content security posture, Akamai announced.
Access Revocation addresses numerous attack vectors, including credential theft, system hacking, and VPN abuse, and the addition of more third third-party watermarking partners will give Akamai customers more options to tackle the rebroadcasting of stolen streams, according to Alex Balford, Akamai’s senior product marketing manager for media and entertainment.
“We started off simple authentication, added encryption at the edge, which we can do on a session level, instead of an asset or user level,,” he said. “We decided to double down and work with watermarking vendors. So for content that is 4K or early release or on the premium end of the spectrum, a lot of the rights owners require watermarking. We’ve found a really effective — and commonly asked-for — solution.”
Along with NAGRA NexGuard forensic watermarking, Irdeto TraceMark, ContentArmor forensic watermarking, Friend MTS ASiD watermarking, INKA Entworks PallyCon forensic watermarking and Verimatrix’s StreamMark are all integrated into Akamai’s edge network, allowing broadcast customers to realize added benefits for detecting illegal streams.
“While we’ve seen a greater sense of urgency when it comes to securing live events, these combined solutions are equally effective for linear/simulcast streaming and video on demand use cases,” Akamai’s Chris Nicholson wrote in a blog post. “For any instance, the integrations are complete and ready to go out of the box so users can begin securing their content and protecting revenues right away.”
All of the watermarking solution providers are part of Akamai’s Media Technology Partner program, which is designed to foster interoperability between Akamai and third-party solution providers.
For more information, visit Akamai’s Media Content Security Solutions.
