Secure 4K HD Content, Forensic Watermarking

[Ink]

TheRegister: Hollywood: How do we secure high-def 4K content? Easy. Just BRAND the pirates
You only have to get it wrong once, and you end up in prison

Movielabs, the R&D business for Hollywood studios, has just issued a new specification for securing 4K high-def streaming video content, and one of the things that it’s going to demand is forensic watermarking.

This spec is being described as “recommendations”, but studios will need to adopt these overnight as the hard and fast rules if they want to gain security approval to distribute quality 4K video.

A watermark has to be introduced in all 4K delivery, at the worst case at the server streaming the content (so that each stream is unique), or better still at the device. The latter will mean that the guilty party customer can be identified from the source of any copy found on the internet.