Watermarking for adaptive streaming protocols

Abstract

Online multimedia distribution is often done by means of adaptive streaming protocols. To protect this content, its owners apply a unique watermark to each copy. However, sending a unique copy to each client incurs a prohibitive cost, especially in terms of bandwidth and server load, and embedding a watermark on a client device not only compromises the system security, but also is not feasible in the uncontrolled environment such as the Internet. In this paper, we propose to solve this problem by creating a few streams, each with different but constant watermarks, and force the client to switch between the streams. This will result in a uniquely watermarked stream for the each client. We illustrate our solution on the example of the currently deployed adaptive streaming protocols. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.