Viaccess-Orca and Harmonic team up for sports watermarking

OTT and TV platform provider Viaccess-Orca (VO) has announced a partnership with Harmonic to optimise content protection for live sports streaming. 

VO’s dynamic watermarking technology will be integrated with Harmonic’s VOS360 cloud SaaS platform. The companies said that the combination will offer content owners and providers a “simple, scalable solution for quickly identifying piracy sources and stopping content restreaming”.

VO’s dynamic watermarking detects content redistributed from broadcast, IPTV, and OTT networks. It allows operators to identify and remove the source of restreaming within minutes, which is critical for live sports events. Blind identification on VO’s dynamic watermarking technology eliminates the need for metadata and enables content providers to automatically detect the chunk size of the original stream. Fully scalable, dynamic watermarking can scan millions of devices at once and pinpoint those that are pirating content.

Harmonic’s VOS360 cloud platform meanwhile promises to simplify the delivery and monetisation of live sports content at scale, ensuring low latency and video quality up to UHD. Running on three major public clouds, the end-to-end SaaS platform provides unparalleled agility, resiliency, security, and scalability for a superior viewing experience. Based on a pay-per-use business model, the VOS360 platform enables operators to only pay for watermarking when needed.

Mathieu Harel, product director of Watermarking at Viaccess-Orca, said: “Sports piracy is a dangerous threat to the industry, costing billions of dollars in revenue loss every year. By integrating our dynamic watermarking technology with Harmonic’s cloud platform, we are empowering sports content owners and content providers with a flexible business model, making it simpler and safer than ever to deliver premium live sports content.”

Eric Gallier, vice president, Video Customer Solutions at Harmonic, said: “The ultimate way to protect live sports content is with a robust watermarking technology. We’re excited to bring Viaccess-Orca’s dynamic watermarking technology to our VOS360 SaaS platform. With this new integration, we’re offering an automated and scalable event-based Anti-Piracy solution to safeguard live sports content.”