Video Breakthroughs

Civolution, a leading provider of technology and solutions for identifying, managing and monetizing media content, has announced that its NexGuard – Online Media Delivery (OMD) video watermarking technology will run on Windows Azure Media Services. Windows Azure Media Services is a new set of cloud-based media technologies that enable Microsoft Corp.’s customers and partners to create, distribute and manage customized media solutions across all types of devices and platforms. As the newest addition to Civolution’s extensive and award-winning forensic watermarking application suite, NexGuard – OMD enables secure delivery of digital media assets processed through the cloud on Windows Azure.

Windows Azure Media Services enables users to upload a video asset to the cloud and configure watermarked output renditions. The watermark insertion is performed in two stages. The first stage, referred to as ‘watermark pre-processing’, is performed once per media asset while transcoding original assets to the desired delivery format. The second step, referred to as ‘watermark smart embedding’ is applied upon streaming by Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) or third party CDNs.

After a media asset is passed through the NexGuard watermark pre-processor, the file is delivered in Smooth Streaming format, to PC, Mac, Xbox and whole host of connected devices like iOS, Android and Connected TV’s which are all capable of supporting smooth streaming format. This format can then be uploaded to a CDN for delivery to the end user and is fully compliant with Microsoft Silverlight. At the CDN level, a transaction identifier is applied by the NexGuard watermark smart embedder, making each delivered stream and copies thereof uniquely traceable. In November 2011 Civolution announced it joined the Akamai NetAlliance partner program as a Digital Media Solution Partner, integrating its NexGuard smart embedder technology with Akamai’s HD CDN.

Impressive whitepaper on using edge technologies to provide a quality feedback channel from TV second screen apps : audio watermarking, Node.js, Hadoop, Redis, Flume, Grails, Sqoop... all this in the Amazon EC2 cloud for scalability. Respect !