With all the billions of dollars that are being invested in high-quality original TV shows, piracy prevention is becoming more important than ever. Content security is an imperative for video providers to keep valuable assets from being consumed illicitly online. Last Friday, Akamai introduced support for watermarking content to help prevent piracy and to help trace leaks to their source.

Akamai uses an AB watermarking approach where marks are embedded into the audio or video of the content. There are A and B versions of the content which are then segmented similar to Adaptive Bitrate Delivery. The versions are recombined in Akamai’s edge network at session playout to form a distinct watermarking pattern and session identifier. Akamai has integrated with watermarking providers Nagra, Verimatrix, Irdeto and ContentArmor.

Akamai’s watermarking solution can be used for live, linear/simulcast and VOD for HLS and DASH formats.

More details about the workflow and the solution can be found here.

In addition, Akamai also announced a new edge-based Access Revocation API that lets video providers terminate a streaming session in real-time if it is unauthorized by revoking access to a token that was associated with a playback URL. More details are here.