United Group taps Nagra for digital watermarking

South-eastern European service provider United Group’s United Cloud ‘innovation centre’ has chosen technology outfit Nagra’s NexGuard Watermarking to further ensure OTT content protection for all United Group’s assets.

As part of the provider’s OTT content protection expansion, Nagra’s NexGuard watermarking is intended to ensure United Group’s protection of all types of content assets. The deployment includes server-side watermarking deployed on their private cloud, enabling United Group to to shut down piracy at the source and in real time, according to Nagra.

NexGuard forensic video watermarking solutions are used by major pay TV operators and streaming services to deter and combat piracy, particularly for premium VOD and live sports. Nagra says the technology helps to identify the source of a content leak quickly and efficiently so that effective anti-piracy action can be taken.

NexGuard forensic watermarks can be applied at a consumer session and set-top box device level to pinpoint the source of a piracy leak including those used to feed illicit streaming servers, enabling appropriate anti-piracy action, according to the company.

“After performing a series of due diligence tests, where we have determined imperceptibility of Nagra’s watermarks, we were also impressed with the speed of leak detection and ease of client-side integration in our device footprint, along with fast integration of Nagra’s NexGuard with our in-house Gladiator anti-piracy platform. Nagra was the obvious choice to fill our OTT security needs now and in the future,” said Sergej Berišaj, CTO of United Cloud.

“OTT is the future, and NAGRA is playing a key role in the industry to protect that future. With our NexGuard forensic watermarking, we bring a unique combination of stability, performance, and ease of integration that has been proven to protect our customer’s business models by identifying piracy sources and shutting them down quickly” said Olivier Mett, SVP EMEA region at Nagra.