Illegal Broadcasting: A Way for Protecting Revenue

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is adopted by Over-the-Top (OTT) providers, intended to prevent unauthorized access and modification of content. However, DRM technology suffers from tracing content redistribution. Watermarking is a way to address this problem. The majority of watermarking is performing some actions in order to make possible unique request patterns per client for each content. The motivation behind this study is to achieve secure video streaming and reclaim lost revenue by tracing content redistribution without compromising the Quality of Experience (QoE). In this regard, we considered the best applicable watermarking technology (server-side vs client-side) as well as the limitations caused by the terminal processing power of legacy devices during the implementation. As a result, we implemented "Irdeto" server-side watermarking technology and run it in Digiturk live streaming platform. The results indicate that implemented solution can protect content redistribution without significantly compromising QoE.