CHESEAUX-SUR-LAUSANNE, Switzerland and PHOENIX—Nagravision today announced the launch of a new fully managed, event-based watermarking-as-a-service solution with Harmonic, extending a long-standing collaboration. The solution will be available as an upgrade for existing Harmonic VOS 360 Media SaaS customers or as part of the NAGRA Streaming Security solution.

The combined, event-ready watermarking-as-a-service solution builds on deep technical integration between Harmonic’s VOS 360 Media solution and NAGRA NexGuard forensic watermarking, a core component of the NAGRA Streaming Security solution that allows rights owners to quickly identify and mitigate illegal restreaming during live events. Together, they enable major live sports and OTT event streamers to activate A/B watermarking— increasingly mandated by content rights holders — with dramatically reduced operational burdens, complexity, and cost.

In addition, the solution removes the challenges of deploying and maintaining the infrastructure required for high-volume, low-latency switching. By deploying NAGRA NexGuard forensic watermarking as a fully managed service on Harmonic’s cloud-native SaaS solution, operators pay only for the events where forensic watermarking is required. Harmonic manages the end-to-end orchestration, scalability and service up-time. This new operational model significantly reduces both per-event cost and internal engineering overheads, Harmonic said.

“As consumers increasingly turn to streaming to watch live events, our customers need powerful security solutions that are effortless to deploy and deliver strong business outcomes,” said Gil Rudge, Senior Vice President, Solutions and Americas Sales at Harmonic.

“Through our long-standing collaboration with Nagravision, we are delivering watermarking-as-a-service that eliminates complexity, lowers costs and activates only when needed. This is exactly the type of agile, event-based security model the market has been asking for.”

“As our industry continues to face high levels of live sports piracy, our customers need solutions that deliver uncompromising security to protect their investments in premium content,” said Stéphane Le Dreau, senior vice president, Global Product Management & Sales Development at Nagravision.

“Our expanded solution with Harmonic makes our well-established edge-based forensic watermarking accessible as an on-demand service that fits the operational realities of today’s major event streamers. It is the pragmatic innovation that the market needs as more live events are delivered via streaming.”

Harmonic will be in Booth W2831 and Nagravision will be in meeting room W2379MR, both in the West Hall of the LVCC during the 2026 NAB Show, April 19-22 in Las Vegas.

With the beginning of the 2024 campaign season and elections just around the corner, video watermarking expert Verance announced in November a collaborative watermarking initiative it’s spearheading along with the help of TV and digital news organizations as well as CE manufacturers to combat deepfakes.

The idea is to give viewers a way to tell if the media they are consuming has been tampered with or modified during distribution. 

While on-target—a recent poll showed more than half of Americans are concerned about the impact of deepfakes on the election—the effort raises a troubling question. Does the public even have enough confidence in the media to believe what it reports in the first place, regardless of whether the video is legit or a deepfake?

Consider the findings of a September 2022 Gallup poll. Thirty-eight percent of respondents had no trust in the media. Only 14% of Republicans said they trusted the media, while 27% of independents said they did. Driving the average of all respondents who trust the media to 34% were Democrats, seven out of 10 of whom said they trusted the media. Overall, only 7% of respondents said they had a “great deal” of trust and confidence in the media.

Perhaps Pew Research uncovered the reason why. Polls conducted in February and March 2022 found that 76% of the public said journalists should work to give every side of an issue “equal coverage.” Journalists on the other hand didn’t show a similar level of commitment to “bothsidesism,” as Pew dubbed it. Only 55% of journalists told Pew all sides of an issue should receive equal coverage.

Or maybe it can be chalked up to the public’s general inability to distinguish between fact and opinion. A February-March 2018 Pew Research poll gave respondents five fact-based and five opinion-based statements and asked them to identify what type of statement each was. Only 26% could correctly classify all five statements. Twenty-four percent got four right. The results for correctly categorizing opinion statements were somewhat better, but still poor. Thirty-five percent identified all five opinion statements correctly, and 24% got four correct.

While Verance’s effort to protect the public from deepfakes is commendable, it seems a bit like putting the cart before the horse. It proposes to use technology to solve a problem that is much more deeply rooted.

Before the public can ever trust a watermark the media provides for its content to head off deepfakes, they first must begin trusting the media in greater numbers. Maybe good places to start are more balanced coverage, a hard separation of fact and opinion and clearly identifying each.

SAN DIEGO—Heeyong Park has joined Verance as its Korea Country Manager to work with electronics manufacturers such as Samsung and LG on the Verance Aspect audio watermark, part of the ATSC 3.0 Next-Gen TV standard, the company announced today.

The watermark enables several Next-Gen TV features, such as personalization and interactivity, and can be integrated into both ATSC 1.0 and 3.0 distribution paths and receivers.

Park, a former Samsung executive, managed and led agreements related to metadata solution providers TiVo and Nielsen (Gracenote) for global smart TV video and music services, Verance said. He also was involved in deals with service partners, including Google, Spotify and Reuters.

[Read: LG Completes Smart TV Tests Of Verance Watermarking Tech]

He also served on Samsung’s product strategy team for smart TVs and the Internet of Things and developed and executed global smart TV strategy and customization in North America, Europe and emerging nations.

For a comprehensive source of TV Technology’s ATSC 3.0 coverage, see our ATSC3 silo.