Nagra Launches Nexguard Forensic Watermarking On Akamai Edge Network

Nagra, an independent provider of content protection and multiscreen television solutions, today announced that its NexGuard Streaming watermarking solution for OTT has been integrated with Akamai, the intelligent edge platform for securing and delivering digital experiences.

The integrated solution uses Akamai’s edge platform to bring an added level of anti-piracy enforcement and revenue protection to rights holders and content owners “allowing them to stop pirated video streams of live sports and premium VOD content in real-time and increase the traceability of those premium assets,” the company said.

“Partnering with Akamai Technologies was a natural evolution to our anti-piracy activities given the global reach and volume of high value content being distributed through their network,” said Jean-Philippe Plantevin, VP anti-piracy at Nagra.

“The unique combination of our NexGuard Streaming forensic watermarking technology with Akamai’s access revocation ensures rights holders and content owners have a robust and scalable solution to guard against commercial piracy of their high value live and VOD content and enables us to increase the volume of takedowns of pirated OTT streams. This is particularly important in today’s unprecedented times as content owners shift their distribution strategies opting for early release of their content via streaming,” Plantevin added.

“The addition of Nagra to our ecosystem will give Akamai customers more options to tackle the rebroadcasting of stolen streams and reinforces our new access revocation capabilities,” said Amit Kasturia, senior manager of media product management at Akamai. “Nagra has been a committed partner in identifying new ways in which we can work together to be more effective in the fight against piracy. We were impressed with the way they embraced our API approach and helped accelerate the initial launch of these capabilities.”

NexGuard Streaming lets content owners and pay TV operators to fight commercial piracy by identifying the source of a content leak in a matter of minutes, and allowing targeted anti-piracy actions to stop illicit content restreaming as a result.

NexGuard Streaming embeds a session-specific forensic watermark for both premium OTT VOD and OTT live channels, including sports. It works with any OTT streaming device and client application, removing the need for any device-side integration. It scales easily to millions of concurrent sessions with CDN caching and works with all common streaming formats and DRMs.