Digital Rapids—a leading developer of scalable solutions for content ingest, encoding, transcoding, protection and delivery—has released version 2.3 software for the StreamZ CP family of professional content encoding solutions with integrated digital video watermarking. This new version significantly expands the systems’ forensic watermarking capabilities.
StreamZ CP builds upon the acclaimed StreamZ and StreamZHD encoding and transcoding platforms, adding sophisticated forensic watermarking technology from Philips for rights protection and tracking. Forensic watermarks can be applied during realtime encoding to any format, and watermarked digital video can be later analyzed with a software watermark decoder to determine its source. The robust watermarks can be detected even after significant alteration to the video such as format conversion, further compression to a low bit rate, or scaling down to half of the original resolution.
Enhancements to the watermarking functions in StreamZ CP 2.3 include:
- Watermarking can be applied during both transcoding and live encoding.
- Up to five separate watermarking keys can be layered in a single realtime pass, ideal when there are multiple levels of content stakeholders each requiring distinct identification.
- An integrated ticketing database enables tracking of used watermarking keys against user-specified properties and data for easy identification.
The forensic watermarking capabilities of StreamZ CP enable a powerful new level of security for both internal and external distribution applications including public screenings, review and approval, video on demand (VOD), archiving and more.
“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 and enabling content owners to track the source of any violations,” said Brick Eksten, President of Digital Rapids Corporation. “In tests of the Philips technology, even content captured by a consumer camcorder from a movie theater screen could be tracked back to its origin. StreamZ CP delivers a uniquely powerful and full-featured forensic watermarking implementation supporting the entire workflow from creation to tracking, enabling a strong new level of content protection.”
The standard definition StreamZ CP and high definition StreamZHD CP combine powerful hardware for video and audio capture and pre-processing with the intuitive Stream software, delivering realtime, multi-format media encoding, transcoding, protection and streaming. The advanced, hardware-based video processing features—including motion adaptive de-interlacing, scaling, filtering, and 3D motion-adaptive noise reduction—enable optimum quality and the most efficient use of bandwidth in the compressed result, while the software’s comprehensive automation and integration features enable StreamZ and StreamZHD to fit seamlessly into any post production or broadcast workflow. Existing StreamZ and StreamZHD systems can also be upgraded with equivalent forensic watermarking functionality through paid software options.
The complete line of Digital Rapids products, including the StreamZ CP family, will be showcased at IBC 2006 in September, in stand number 7.641.
