Friend MTS highlights piracy threats behind development of battle-hardened, 3rdgeneration ASiD watermarking
Growth in sophisticated visual manipulation attacks and OTT player interference
is impacting content providers
Amsterdam, Netherlands – September 14, 2018 – Friend MTS, the Emmy Award winning content and revenue protection specialist, has highlighted the key streaming piracy threats that have driven the development of its third generation of ASiD subscriber watermarking and global monitoring.
Jonathan Friend, CEO at Friend MTS,said:“Premium content providers have seen a significant increase in sophisticated visual manipulation attacks, like collusion, which are much more challenging than the typical masking and cropping approaches to content theft. Another key attack mode to platform watermarking is OTT player interference to tamper with the subscriber ID.”
“These developments in the piracy space have been major drivers behind the introduction of our third generation of ASiDwatermarking, which has been rigorously tested in the field in the most demanding conditions. It’s a fully battle-hardened watermarking service”.
Friend MTS’ third generation ASiDsubscriber-levelwatermarking offers significantly uprated robustness to defend the service from tampering by pirates. There are new watermarking algorithms which provide advanced protection against video manipulation attacks.
There is also enhanced payload handling to protect OTT services against subscriber identity interference. Additionally, there are new code hooks to provide faster detection of any interference of the OTT player integration, which can trigger the revoking of a subscriber’s access to secure the content.
The robustness of Friend MTS’ watermarking has been independently tested by security consultancy Cartesian, and the system has undergone Hollywood studio ‘golden eye’ evaluation with demanding 4K/UHD and HDR content.
Neil Sharpe, Director Product Marketing, said:“Our ASiD watermarking has remained secure against every attempted attack made to date over the past three years since its introduction. It’s an unmatched track record in stopping real-world piracy.
“With the introduction of our third generation of watermarking, we’re ensuring that ASiD continues to stay ahead of fast evolving piracy threats.”
The ASiD service is the most widely deployed subscriber-level watermarking for premium sports and entertainment content. It can stop streaming piracy in minutes by cutting it off at the source; this is done by terminating the access of the subscriber that’s redistributing the content.
When ASiD was introduced by a major broadcaster which accounted for 60% of the sports channel piracy in its market, this level was reduced to less than 1% within weeks.
Suitable for live channels, PPV events and on-demand assets, theASiD watermarking is invisible, ultra-robust and fully scalable. It’s highly effective against illicit streaming devices, Kodi add-ons, mobile apps, websites and social media.
The integrated global monitoring service uses fingerprint-based content recognition to enable highly automated operation, and this can tackle even the largest live sports events which can generate thousands of pirate streams.
Visitors to IBC 2018 will be able to see how Friend MTS’ ASiD service can stop streaming piracy with traditional and OTT content delivery. More information about Friend MTS’ content protection services is available at www.friendmts.com.
About Friend MTS
Friend MTS protects content and revenues for many of the world’s largest media and entertainment companies. Its broadcast and OTT security services protect premium live channels and events, as well as on demand entertainment programming from illegal redistribution. The company’s Emmy Award winning portfolio of managed services includes global monitoring using advanced network forensics technology and fingerprint-based automatic content recognition. This enables detailed insights on illicit video consumption and network-level piracy mitigation. The monitoring capability, coupled with the world’s most deployed subscriber-level watermarking technology and direct integrations with subscriber management systems, allows the rapid, automated termination of illegal sources of service or content theft. For more information about Friend MTS, visitwww.friendmts.com
