By Joseph Oren, Cinea Inc. a Dolby Company
Providing Cable consumers with premium (e.g. HD or early window) content via Video on Demand services is projected to become a key revenue source for system operators. Yet the Hollywood studios insist that before this content will be made available, enhanced content protection technologies must be deployed within the content distribution infrastructure i . Specifically, forensic watermarking, defined as the binding of unique traceable information to the video streams, is increasingly mentioned as an essential content protection layer, one that complements existing conditional access and digital rights management solutions. ii This paper describes how this new business requirement can be technically and economically fulfilled by watermarking technologies now reaching the market. Our focus will be on watermarking technology implemented in the consumer’s equipment, commonly called the Set Top Box (STB)