The role of watermarking in live sports streaming

Beyond rightful owners losing an enormous amount of revenue, content piracy in the live sports watermarking world is a direct threat to sports teams’ sponsorship deals. Because sports organisations are unable to include pirated audiences in their audience estimates, the numbers of viewers are grossly under-reported.

Designed to protect content during transit to the consumer’s player, a multi-DRM service protects the legitimate, authorized path from origination of the stream to the point of consumption.

DRM works by managing the content encryption key exchange between the secured playback device (the player) and the license service. DRM defines usage policies for the content and enforces those policies within the player environment.

Taking up where DRM leaves off, video watermarking can confirm the outermost point of legitimate use. With that information, an organisation can isolate pirated content and identify the “bad actors” – the content pirates.