Management

Content protection services firm Friend MTS has launched the fourth generation of its Advanced Subscriber Identification (ASiD) subscriber-level watermarking suite solutions, covering a range of content protection scenarios for securing content across broadcast and OTT devices, clients and applications.

The updated suite also includes the new ASiD OTT Edge-Switched, a server-side A/B variant solution with additional watermarking for premium content, protecting both live and VOD assets from unauthorized redistribution.

“We are at the forefront of developing and deploying real world end-to-end content protection solutions at scale for our valuable sports and entertainment customers, which is important now more than ever as the pandemic continues to shape the piracy landscape as well as the technology needs to combat this prevalent issue,” said Friend MTS CEO Jonathan Friend. “Developed to meet the moment, we are thrilled to introduce our 4th Generation ASiD watermarking and monitoring solutions with enhancements to help our customers protect their valuable content in a larger industry effort to drive subscriber growth and safeguard revenue.”

New enhancements in the ASiD suite include:

• ASiD Embedded (Enhanced), which offers accelerated watermark generation in certain devices, and optimizations to enable memory and CPU-efficient watermark parameters for different content types (UHD, HD, linear channels vs. on-demand content, etc).

• ASiD OTT Client-composited (Enhanced), which introduces a new collaboration mechanism between headend and client, and improved intelligence feedback to take action on bad actors. The solution now offers higher precision of session identification and stronger support for cloud PVR, as well as a new feature to enable variable per-device watermark parameters for different content and playback types to enable optimized watermark compositing based on individual client devices’ capabilities.

• The new ASiD OTT Edge-Switched, which is based on proprietary algorithms, and benefits from other Friend MTS technologies, offering accelerated watermark extraction while working in conjunction with the company’s distributor-level watermarking solution, Distribution iD.

The 4th Generation ASiD solutions remain compliant with the MovieLabs Specification for Enhanced Content Protection, including 4K/UHD and HDR content.

Friend MTS’ ASiD OTT offerings also shares optional ASiD iQ enhancement that monitors for fraudulent user behavior, flags bad actors, and enables content owners and service operators to react in real-time.

For more information, click here.