LOS ANGELES—The United States Patent and Trademark Office has granted a patent to Prime Focus Technologies for its Just-in-Time embedded watermarking solution of streaming proxies within the company’s CLEAR platform.
This patent (No. 10,904,595) covers two innovations. First, the ability to apply user-specific burnt-in watermarks, real-time; and secondly, making a Just-in-Time watermarked stream “as seamless as that of a CLEAN stream,” PFT says.
According to PFT, Just-in-Time watermarking treats streaming segments requests from a user’s video player as an atomic segment that needs to be transcoded by a GPU-farm and handed back in real-time to the player, as well as meeting the needs of standard streaming protocols, including HLS/DASH. As a result, any segment requested, across any bit rate, is served with a watermark and any high-speed trick-play request (up to 3x) is served elegantly.
“Piracy has been and continues to heavily impact our industry at the world-wide level. Such an invention now provides studios and content owners the ability to protect their pre-release content through strong and reliable deterrence mechanisms that are embedded within their streaming infrastructures” said Ramki Sankaranarayanan, founder and global CEO, Prime Focus Technologies. “With Cloud costs continuing to drop and GPUs becoming even more affordable, it is a matter of time when the industry will decide to provide streaming URLs to their content-partners and vendors, instead of creating copies of content, individually watermarked for their use.”
For more information, visit www.primefocustechnologies.com.
