Business

One of the top OTT vendors from South Korea having more than 10,000 titles wanted to secure Hollywood movies released on their platform. They have their own encoding and transcoding system on premise and wanted a solution which will apply forensic invisible watermark for content & can support various specification: H.264, H.265, VP9, HDR10+, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos without degradation to quality and robust to attacks

Challenges

• Scalable, robust watermarking solution to support various specification VP9, HDR10+, Dolby 
• Should be easy to integrate in their existing environment
• Should not degrade the viewing quality
• Watermarking should not be visible on High resolution TV with HDR 10+
• Watermark should be resistant to attack and supports auto extraction

 Solution

• Develop a plugin which can generate watermarked content without changing the workflow
• Easy pluggable FFMPEG based video filter plugin module was developed
• It meet all the customer specifications and requirement of the hollywood studio
• Extensively tested with all the formats and the best part was watermark detection succeeded even with camcorder contents.

Outcome

• PallyCon’s server side watermarking solution was developed as a plugin for ease of integration in a months time
• This plugin supported all the specification/requirement mentioned by the customer
• It also helped the vendor go live with the solution within a couple of  weeks

Workflow

• The video file is watermarked using the PallyCon FFMPEG video filter plugin during the encoding process
• The generated stream is then trancoded to various resolutions and packaged in DASH/HLS format
• When a playback request is made, the PallyCon session Manager provides a watermark token 
• The watermark token is used by the CDN watermark embedder to mix the A/B streams and deliver a unique stream to the user.
• Incase of content leak the specific user information can be extracted from it.

PallyCon’s start of the art developed forensic watermarking solution has been cartesian certified for robustness and supports quick integration and secure content economically.

Benefits of PallyCon forensic watermarking:

• Imperceptible, free from any artifacts, does not degrade viewing experience. 
• Dynamic, scalable server side watermarking for large audience
• Easy to integrate
• Robust to various attacks such as cropping, camcording, scaling, filtering and retains watermark even after Digital to analog conversion
• Pre Integrated with Akamai, Cloudfront
• Support Blind autodetection and non-blind detection method

Item	Specification
Codec	H.264, H.265, VP9* support Other codecs have not been identified but are able to be supported.
File format	Any Format
Resolution supported	Up to 4k/UHD
Dynamic Range	SDR, HDR (H.265) supported, HDR 10+, Dolby Vision
Streaming Protocol	DASH, HLS, CMAF
CDN integration	Cloudfront, Akamai
Watermark Datasize	Up to 255 bytes string using mapping table
DRM integration	Pre-integrated with Multi-DRM Playready, Fairplay and Widevine
Detection resolution	At Least 480P with 1Mbps – 720p or higher quality recommended (**with video super resolution on edge device can support 360p)
Length of video for detection	5 minutes video length
Distribute encoding	Support