The next level in content protection

As advances in digital video technology continue to increase the possibilities for illegal distribution of copyrighted content at high quality, content owners are increasingly sensitive to the need for robust content protection against piracy. Digital Rights Management technologies for conditional access are one level of content protection, but DRM alone doesn’t provide complete security. Forensic watermarking adds another significant layer of protection, acting as a deterrent to content theft by enabling content owners to track the source of violations.

The forensic watermarking technology from Philips creates an imperceptible watermark using a sophisticated model of human vision. Watermarked digital video can be analyzed with a software watermark decoder. By embedding a unique watermark into the video at various stages of the content chain, rights owners can identify the source of the original digital media from which unauthorized copies were created. The robust watermarks can be detected even after significant alteration to the video such as recompression to other formats, further compression to a low bit rate, noise addition, median filtering, or scaling down to half of the original resolution. The forensic marking capabilities of StreamZ CP enable a strong new level of security for both internal and external distribution applications including public screenings, review and approval, archiving and more.

Powerful, full-featured workflow

StreamZ CP delivers a uniquely powerful and full-featured forensic watermarking implementation supporting the entire workflow from creation to tracking. StreamZ CP allows you to ingest video from a live source, capture frame-accurately from a deck, or transcode between digital formats. Watermarks can be applied during real-time encoding to any format. Watermarks are applied through the Stream software’s standard video processing plug-in interface, making the embedding of marks easy and seamless. Up to five separate watermarks can be layered in a single pass, ideal when there are multiple levels of content stakeholders requiring distinct identification.

StreamZ CP features an integrated watermark ticketing database, letting you track your embedded watermarks against user-specified properties and data for easy identification. The properties stored in database tickets can be customized, and default values can take advantage of the Stream software’s “tags” feature to automatically fill in information such as filenames, dates and more after each encode. Later, to identify the source of watermarked content, you can simply search this database by the watermark identifier detected by the software decoder.

Exceptional encoding quality, performance and flexibility

The StreamZ CP family features all of the powerful capabilities of our StreamZ and StreamZHD media encoding solutions. Hardware-based video pre-processing including motion adaptive de-interlacing and noise reduction ensures optimal output quality and bandwidth efficiency. The intuitive, flexible Stream software lets you encode to multiple formats including Windows Media 9, SMPTE VC-1, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG4, AVC (H.264), QuickTime, AVI, Real and Flash. Automation and integration features such as RS422 deck control, GPI triggers, watch folder support, publishing and automatic distribution to multiple destination options make it easy to incorporate StreamZ CP into your workflow. Standard-definition StreamZ CP servers feature analog and/or digital inputs, while StreamZHD CP systems bring this power to high definition with HD/SD SDI.