Session-based Video Watermarking for IFE

Berlin, Rennes

castLabs, a global pioneer in premium digital video technology and ContentArmor, a leading forensic watermarking vendor, have been working together on a custom In-flight Entertainment (IFE) integration during their continuous partnership to fight against video piracy.

By combining Video Toolkit  and server-side watermarking, castLabs and ContentArmor have developed a session-based forensic watermarking solution that works directly on the encrypted content without breaking the secure data path. Studios increasingly require enhanced content security measures and this solution allows to identify theft sources down to the user account level. Watermarking adds another significant layer of protection for digital media by embedding unique invisible information into streams which cannot be removed, regardless of distortions or alterations being made to content.

“Unique technical challenges exist in the IFE industry such as limited storage on aircraft servers, complex system architectures, and lack of connectivity. Integrating our solutions with ContentArmor has allowed us to robustly secure premium content for distribution onboard, while not increasing overhead to an already limited deployment environment,” says Alec Henthorne, Solution Architect at castLabs.

For this specific integration, the watermark is applied on the fly when the player requests segments of content. It does not require any additional storage capacity to distribute 4K movies on integrated aircrafts’ private screens with limited capacity.

“We are thrilled to partner with castLabs and help airlines to license premium 4K titles thanks to the implementation of forensic watermarking,” said Eric Bénetière VP Marketing & Sales of ContentArmor. “The unique ability of ContentArmor technology to manipulate directly encrypted content added to castLabs Video Toolkit flexibility enables airlines to deploy session-based watermarking in a very effective way.”

Both industry players work to answer the ever-shifting media validation challenges and partner to provide their clients with a variety of security protection techniques which are developed and deployed for video content. In addition to forensic watermarking, castLabs’ cloud-based Video Toolkit service, built on reliable AWS infrastructure, enables high-quality encoding, encryption, subtitle conversion, and packaging of assets into VoD streams.