Irdeto has been awarded three patents by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. A further eight patents are currently pending.
The company says the award puts an official stamp on its watermarking product that makes it the only interoperable, backward-compatible watermarking solution available on the US market. Such qualification will go considerable way to satisfying the requirements of the Hollywood Studios.
“As content owners and operators continue to explore possibilities to deliver premium content services into the home to drive new revenue and growth, the technology needed to manage digital piracy becomes a critical part of the equation,” said Andrew Wajs, chief technology officer for Irdeto. “The more valuable the content, the more rigorous the security measures applied to it must be. Irdeto’s watermarking technology is unique in that it can be applied to any broadcast receiver or set-top box currently in use as well as work with all legacy and already deployed conditional access systems.”
The Irdeto solution can detect pirated content on peer-to-peer sharing networks by applying an invisible “watermark” that ties redistributed content back to any set-top box from which it originated: from there, content owners can identify and shut down illegal distribution networks. In the event of an attack, the solution can be renewed from the headend almost instantly without requiring updates to the box itself, enabling unparalleled renewability, scalability and ease of deployment. For operators, these benefits translate into head-end implementation cost savings, a faster time to market and better overall security in the long term.
