NAB 2019: MSI Touts New Watermarking Solution

James Whitebread, CTO for MarcoPolo Learning, a children’s STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) educational media company, was faced with a dilemma: how to protect the hundreds and hundreds of short-form clips the company offers, without breaking the bank?

The solution was Media Science International’s (MSI) BluMark forensic video watermarking technology, which enables the ability to forensically watermark video of any length, and retrieve the watermark within seconds.

“We’ve got hundreds of clips that need to be protected, and the economics of protecting those clips was very important,” Whitebread said April 7, during the Cybersecurity & Content Protection Summit at NAB. “Coming to MSI, and realizing the economics matched up, was great news to me.”

The presentation — “A Revolution in Digital Watermarking, Watermark Every Frame, Detect in Seconds” — saw Michael Gamble, SVP of customer service for MSI, walk attendees through how the advanced forensic video watermarking technology enabled MarcoPolo to embed and detect payloads in seconds, and how the watermarking technology confronts current industry limitations by providing robust, near-instant payload insertion and retrieval from any length video.

“It’s enabled MarcoPolo to embed imperceptible, robust payloads into short-form content, and retrieve those payloads in a matter of seconds,” Gamble said. “It’s a game-changer for the forensic video watermarking space.”

The BluMark SDK is available for integration with client systems, MSI cloud-based video onDemand and offline desktop applications, and its biggest draw is how quickly and easily it can be applied to short-form content, which typically has less security around it, is usually hard to retrieve, and usually harder to track.

“With 30-plus years in the industry and having conducted extensive research in identifying common limitations of commercially available forensic video watermarking solutions, Media Science International set out to develop a forensic video watermarking product that will watermark any length of video and return the payload in seconds, faster than a fingerprint,” said Graham Oakes, CEO of MSI, before NAB.

Co-produced by the NAB Show and the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA), the Content Protection & Cybersecurity Summit was presented by SafeStream by SHIFT, Akamai, IBM Security, Microsoft Azure, Convergent Risks, the Digital Watermarking Alliance, the Trusted Partner Network, and produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) and the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA), in cooperation with the NAB Show.