LONDON—Pathé has selected Synamedia ContentArmor forensic watermaking to protect premium content on its Pathé Home D2C Transactional VOD (TVOD) streaming service in France by identifying the origin of leaks and taking disruptive countermeasures.

Pathé will safeguard its investment in thousands of movies, including 4K UHD content, across all devices while complying with content owner agreements.

“After evaluating the watermarking options available, we chose to partner with Synamedia because ContentArmor ensures we maintain the high levels of video quality that our users associate with our brand, as well as keeping a tight lid on encoding costs. Safeguarding the content of our partners is crucial for Pathé, and with ContentArmor, we are able to embed imperceptible watermarks in our content, identify the individual accounts of unauthorized users and malicious actors, and take action accordingly,” said Pathé head of platform and video Ivar van der Burg.

Synemedia said Pathé selected ContentArmor because it is well-regarded by Hollywood studios. It also offers the integration flexibility and cost effectiveness Pathé requires. Unlike other solutions that encode content multiple times to insert the watermark, ContentArmor only encodes content once, reducing both the complexity and cost of securing premium 4K UHD content, Synamedia said.

As a server-side solution, ContentArmor supports the highest security standards for session-based watermarking, ensuring robust protection for Pathé’s assets, the company said.

More information is available on the company’s website.

SAN DIEGO—Video watermarking is now a capability of Verance’s Aspect platform, the company announced. Based on the commercial implementation of the ATSC video watermarking specification, the Aspect platform now supports both audio and video watermarks for multiple standards and works in the ATSC 1.0 broadcast environment.

Verance says that the audio and video watermarking technology of Aspect enables users to activate Dynamic Ad Insertion across all devices and distribution paths; it has 100% positive identification of live and time-shifted content, able to distinguish between DVR playback and VOD; frame-accurate timing; tuned to be invisible to the viewer; and interoperable with existing and future DAI services, including ATSC, HbbTV/DVB-Targeted advertising and Project OAR.

Both the audio and video watermarks allow information required for DAI activation in a TV set to pass through distribution environments with ease, including over HDMI links and through existing distribution equipment and set-top boxes.

Aspect also allows for the video watermark to complement the audio watermark even when special features for DVR and VOD are deployed. For instance, Verance says that in instances of fast-forwarding or rewinding when the audio is muted, the video watermark allows TVs to capture station identifier and time code information and insert a replacement ad with frame-level accuracy.

Verance will showcase its video and audio watermarking technology at CES 2020, which takes place in Las Vegas, Jan. 7-10.