Synamedia’s ContentArmor Edge Watermarking system inserts watermarks at the CDN edge, for faster leak detection and removal of pirated content with minimal change to infrastructure.
Synamedia has developed an edge watermarking system designed to speed up the disruption of pirated video streams. ContentArmor Edge Watermarking inserts watermarks at the CDN edge, enabling faster detection of leaks and removal of pirated content while reducing infrastructure requirements. The solution is CDN-agnostic, and its first CDN integration will be with the Synamedia Fluid EdgeCDN. It will debut at NAB 2026, marking ten years after the initial release of ContentArmor.
As a server-side solution, it embeds unique watermarks directly into the compressed stream at the CDN edge, reducing insertion and extraction times by a large margin and limiting end-to-end session disruption time to only a few minutes. That speed is significant for protecting live sports and other high-value content, where delays in identifying and removing pirated streams can result in substantial losses.
Reducing VOD Overheads
The technology also controls delivery costs for video-on-demand content by avoiding the need for two separate streams. This lowers bandwidth requirements between origin and edge servers, as well as within edge server caches, reducing both infrastructure and operational overheads.
At the time of ContentArmor's founding in 2016, Synamedia had already identified edge watermarking as a goal, but found it technically out of reach. Limited CPU capacity at the edge and the absence of DRM encryption keys on edge servers made deployment unfeasible at the time. The industry instead settled on A/B watermarking, a technique in which two distinct versions of the same encrypted content are cached in the CDN and a unique, scrambled sequence of A/B segments is served to each user.
While A/B watermarking remains effective, edge watermarking removes several of its constraints as broadcasters and streamers look for faster and more cost-effective ways to combat piracy.
Unique Identifier per Session
The new system works by encoding content once at the headend and distributing it through the CDN. At the edge, a lightweight watermarking agent then inserts a unique identifier for each session on the fly. The watermark can be extracted more quickly than with A/B watermarking, owing to a higher bit density.
Alain Durand, Senior Director at Synamedia, said the product was the result of their decade-long effort to make server-side forensic watermarking viable at the edge. "Since ContentArmor was founded in 2016, we understood the potential of edge watermarking," he said. "As the only provider of server-side watermarking in the compressed bitstream, together with Synamedia's CDN expertise, we have overcome the technical challenges, integrated watermarking directly with the CDN and achieved the scalability needed to support live streaming." www.synamedia.com
