Amsterdam-based Digital Rights Management (DRM) company castLabs has introduced what it feels is the next step in content protection through a new technique, dubbed "single-frame forensic watermaking". The concept behind the DRM system is to leverage the company's cloud-based "Video Toolkit solution", which processes and protects uploaded content (such as video, images, and documents) by adding "tunable watermarks", which are then redistributed alongside the (now-watermarked and monitored) content.
The basic idea of the service is that it can be applied either standalone or alongside other DRM-protection mechanisms, while offering an additional layer of "tunable" security to any sensitive content. When the content is uploaded through the company's AWS-hosted solution, the company's software secretly embeds identifying information on each frame by "creating unique watermark IDs, [and] strategically hiding them within video frames or other visual digital assets." How strategic that hiding is, however, is unclear: the company does say that at least for video streaming, its service watermarks "every frame entirely", meaning that there must be included redundancies in how the data is encoded across frames.
