Hollywood studios are able to stop an increase in the quantity of piracy in Covid times by making use of forensic watermarks

A viewership trend that has been expanding in the online video arena over the past five to six years began to gain momentum before the Covid-19 epidemic. This pandemic has increased the intensity of the viewership trend. This pattern can be traced all the way back to the beginning, when people first started watching videos online. The number of people utilising over-the-top (OTT) platforms has increased dramatically, and the industry as a whole is now worth several billion dollars and is growing by a factor of 10 each year.

However, the lockdown orders that have been issued by governments in various parts of the world have attracted attention to the act of piracy, which has also expanded at a rapid rate. It is projected that piracy websites that host illegal movies would receive billions of views in the year 2020, when all of that content will be available on legitimate networks. In addition, websites are just one of the many various ways that one can access content that has been illegally downloaded. There are numerous more options as well.

During this time period, studios and OTT platforms grew more active in their usage of digital rights management (DRM) in order to increase compliance with legal duties. This was done in order to increase the likelihood that they would be successful. Together, they are responsible for the payment of millions of dollars to guarantee the security of the transmission of content that is secured by DRM protected content technology. According to the findings of a recent study, the pay-TV and OTT industries might face global revenue losses of up to 67 billion USD by the year 2023 if there is not an effective anti-piracy mechanism in place. These losses would be caused by illegal downloading and sharing of content. The websites and mobile applications that provide pirate content also generate billions of dollars in advertising revenue. This is a direct financial loss for lawful over-the-top (OTT) operators.

The method known as digital rights management (DRM) is something that can assist OTT platforms in encrypting content for users and authenticating their identities before decrypting the content so that it can be played again. Despite this fact, pirates continue to be successful when it comes to stealing premium video content. Video watermarking technology, which is also known as forensic watermarking technology, is utilised by content owners in order to track down video pirates after their recordings have been illegally distributed online. This technique is also known as video forensic watermarking technology. A watermarking tool, which is generally used in conjunction with a multi-DRM tool, embeds metadata in each video frame that is unique to the session, user, or device on which the video is being viewed. This metadata can be used to identify who is watching the video and where it is being watched. This metadata can be used to trace and monitor who exactly is watching the video as well as the location from where they are doing so.

In the event of a leak, the multi-DRM/watermarking vendor conducts a search on the internet for unauthorised copies, extracts watermark information from clips, and then compares it to a database of watermarks that was established at the time the watermark was installed. The process of removing the watermark gives the content owners with the information essential to pursue legal action against the individual who was responsible for leaking the original file to the piracy ecosystem.