Before the emergence of the Covid-19 virus, there was already a sizable and rapidly expanding audience for watching videos online. This audience had been expanding during the previous five or six years. As the pandemic has continued to spread throughout the world, a movement toward increased monitoring has gained momentum. This pattern has remained consistent ever since the introduction of watching videos online. The annual growth rate for the over-the-top (OTT) sector is ten times the rate of traditional media, and the total value of the industry has increased to several billion dollars. This is due to the fact that the yearly growth rate for OTT is ten times higher than the rate for traditional media.
Even if the rate of piracy has increased dramatically, governments in many parts of the world have been issuing orders to shut down websites in an effort to bring more attention to the issue. It is anticipated that by the year 2020, when all of this content will be available on official networks, websites that host illegal movies would have had billions of views. This prediction is based on the fact that the availability of all of this content will be ensured. In addition, websites are just one of the numerous different ways that individuals might gain access to content that has been unlawfully obtained. There are also a great number of other choices.
During this time period, studios and OTT platforms increased their utilisation of DRM in an effort to more effectively meet the legal responsibilities that they were subject to. This step was performed in order to improve their odds of becoming successful. They will have to shell out millions of dollars in order to guarantee the integrity of the content distribution process when it involves DRM protected content. It has been calculated that the pay-TV and OTT industries stand to lose a combined total of up to $67 billion USD in global revenue by the year 2023 if an effective anti-piracy mechanism is not put into place. It is highly likely that these losses are the result of unlicensed downloading and distribution of content. Websites and mobile applications that offer pirated content are key sources of cash for the criminal business. Not only do these websites and apps generate billions of dollars in advertising revenue, but they also generate significant amounts of money from other sources. This presents a significant challenge to the profitability of genuine OTT service providers.
Digital rights management, also known as DRM, is a method that over-the-top (OTT) companies can use to encrypt content for users and authenticate their identities before decrypting the content so it can be played again. Despite this, pirates are still successful in their attempts to steal videos of high quality. After their recordings have been illegally distributed online, content owners frequently utilise a technology known as video watermarking, which is also known as forensic watermarking technology, to trace down video pirates and recover their recordings. This technique also goes by the moniker forensic Video watermarking in some circles. The process of watermarking involves adding metadata that is session-, user-, or device-specific to individual video frames; in most cases, this process is carried out in conjunction with a multi-DRM tool. A video can keep track of who is watching it and from what location thanks to metadata. With the help of this metadata, it is possible to track and keep tabs on the identities of video viewers as well as their locations.
When a leak happens, the multi-DRM and watermarking service provider searches the internet for unauthorised copies, extracts watermark data from clips, and then compares the extracted data to a database of watermarks that was established at the time of installation. By removing the watermark, content owners are presented with proof that can be used as ammunition in a legal lawsuit against the person who was responsible for leaking the original file into the ecosystem of online piracy.
