Beyond rightful owners losing an enormous amount of revenue, content piracy in the live sports watermarking world is a direct threat to sports teams’ sponsorship deals. Because sports organisations are unable to include pirated audiences in their audience estimates, the numbers of viewers are grossly under-reported. These groups stand to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars – more – for every game or match, since audience size is a key basis for sponsorship deals.
Described simply, a video watermark is an embedded overlay that identifies ownership. Taking up where DRM leaves off, video watermarking can confirm the outermost point of legitimate use. With that information, an organisation can isolate pirated content and identify the “bad actors” – the content pirates.
The embedded player accesses the cloud service which replies with a unique identifier as a forensic watermark. The video watermark information is converted into a pattern, similar in concept to a QR code, that is “composited” with the video via an overlay.