Harmonic (NASDAQ: HLIT) and NAGRA announced that the companies are now teaming to improve content protection for live sports streaming with a new watermarking-as-a-service offering.
NAGRA NexGuard forensic watermarking, a key element within the NAGRA Active Streaming Protection framework, has now been integrated with Harmonic's VOS 360 cloud SaaS platform, offering content owners and service providers a streamlined platform for protecting premium content at scale during live sports events.
Harmonic contends its VOS360 cloud SaaS platform "is field-proven in the delivery and monetization of live sports content at scale, ensuring low-latency, pristine video quality up to UHD. Running on the public cloud, the company says the end-to-end SaaS platform "provides unparalleled agility, resiliency, security and scalability for a superior viewing experience." The VOS360 cloud SaaS platform serves thousands of live events every month for leading streaming services.
"A significant rise in piracy during live sports events has fueled the need for stronger content protection solutions," points out Eric Gallier, vice president, video customer solutions at Harmonic. "By integrating NAGRA NexGuard forensic watermarking on our VOS360 cloud SaaS platform, we are offering a simple, automated, scalable and event-based anti-piracy solution to safeguard live sports content."
The NAGRA NexGuard forensic watermarking platform helps to identify the source of a content leak quickly and efficiently so that effective anti-piracy action can be taken. NexGuard embeds a session-specific forensic watermark for live channels and can scale easily to millions of concurrent sessions with CDN caching, working with all common streaming formats and DRMs.
"Fighting piracy and illegal content sharing is critical for sports rights owners to preserve their revenue streams on premium content," concluded Sebastian Kramer, senior vice president, business development and product line management at NAGRA. "Teaming up with Harmonic, we're transforming content protection of live sports to reduce stream and credential hijacking, creating a robust defense against piracy with innovative solutions from our Active Streaming Protection framework that include forensic watermarking."