Nagra integrates watermarking technology with Akamai

Content security provider Nagra’s NexGuard Streaming watermarking technology for OTT has been integrated with CDN leader Akamai’s platform.

Nagra said that the integrated solution taps Akamai’s edge platform to bring additional anti-piracy enforcement and revenue protection to rights holders and content owners allowing them to stop pirated video streams of live sports and premium VOD content in real-time and increase the traceability of those assets.

NexGuard Streaming identifies the source of a content leak to allow targeted anti-piracy actions to stop illicit content restreaming.

The technology embeds a session-specific forensic watermark for both premium OTT VOD and OTT live channels, including sports. It works with any OTT streaming device and client application, removing the need for any device-side integration, can scale to millions of concurrent sessions with CDN caching and works with common streaming formats and DRMs, according to Nagra, which is part of Akamai’s Media Technology Partner programme.

“Partnering with Akamai Technologies was a natural evolution to our anti-piracy activities given the global reach and volume of high value content being distributed through their network. The unique combination of our NexGuard Streaming forensic watermarking technology with Akamai’s access revocation ensures rights holders and content owners have a robust and scalable solution to guard against commercial piracy of their high value live and VOD content and enables us to increase the volume of takedowns of pirated OTT streams. This is particularly important in today’s unprecedented times as content owners shift their distribution strategies opting for early release of their content via streaming,” said Jean-Philippe Plantevin, VP,  anti-piracy at Nagra. “

“The addition of Nagra to our ecosystem will give Akamai customers more options to tackle the rebroadcasting of stolen streams and reinforces our new access revocation capabilities. Nagra has been a committed partner in identifying new ways in which we can work together to be more effective in the fight against piracy. We were impressed with the way they embraced our API approach and helped accelerate the initial launch of these capabilities,” said Amit Kasturia, senior manager of media [roduct management at Akamai.