The Home gateway manufacturer Thomson  plans to incorporate video watermarking technology, which it also developed, into future STBs (set-top boxes) and other video devices. The watermarks are unique to each device and will make it possible for investigators to identify the source of pirated videos.

Consumers will know that the watermarks are there and Thomson hopes to discourage piracy without putting up obstacles to activities such as copying video for use on another device in the home.

"The idea is to slow down piracy without limiting the use of the consumer. They should not be upset about this unless they are widely redistributing content," said Pascal Marie, responsible for strategic marketing at the company's content security division.

The plan is to watermark video with a unique code before it leaves the home gateway or set-top box (STB). To do that, Thomson is working with semiconductor manufacturer STMicroelectronics NV to incorporate NexGuard into digital video chips. NexGuard can mark video encoded in MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) and VC-1 formats.

Next month, the company will show a system capable of directly watermarking content produced with Windows Media Video 9 codecs. "We are able to process directly this format without the need to decode it, watermark it and re-encode it," Marie said.
Thomson sells its gateways and STBs to network operators and  one of its biggest customers is Orange, the Internet access subsidiary of France Télécom, which packages the devices as the LiveBox- all-in-one terminal for telephony, television, Wi-Fi and Internet access.

The watermarking will be applied at two levels. One watermark will identify the network operator distributing the content, and the second one(carrying 40 bits of information) will identify the individual device.
Films projected digitally and captured by a camcorder can still be traced, although "we need a longer period of detection to identify it," he said.

Clips recorded directly from an STB, re-encoded at a lower bit rate and then posted to an online video sharing service might be identifiable after just a few seconds.

written by Cristian L.