M+E Daily

Michelle Munson, CEO and co-founder of Eluv.io, highlighted the latest innovations in video/content security leveraging the joint capabilities of Eluvio and NAGRA during the Dec. 5 Content Production Summit at The Culver Theater in Culver City, California.

During the premium streaming session “Per Session End-to-End Content Security (VOD & Live),” Munson presented real-world use cases, discussed the industry’s first integration of forensic watermarking into Eluvio’s global blockchain Fabric for premium content distribution, and more.

In June, Eluvio and NAGRA announced the integration of NAGRA NexGuard forensic watermarking to secure playback of TV, films, and other premium video through the Eluvio Content Fabric and complementary Eluvio Media Wallet. That represented the industry’s first integration of forensic watermarking into Eluvio’s global blockchain Fabric for premium content distribution.

Eluvio and NAGRA have integrated their technologies to “do what I think is a first of [its] kind in terms of premium streaming,” Munson told attendees. “What we’re going to describe today is how it is now possible to achieve truly per-session, end-to-end content security that can scale with today’s live content in live sports with  ultra-low latency and also to do it with premium VOD to be able to do it at scale and to hopefully mitigate so many of the challenges that we’ve been talking about today.”

Eluvio’s Content Fabric, she said, is “very different than traditional” content delivery networks (CDNs) and media cloud stacks. “But, in its own way, it ends up achieving the same purposes,” she noted, explaining: “It allows us to achieve streaming, content distribution, and storage for today’s premium content.  The protocol first and foremost is open. It’s also built in a decentralised architecture, and, by open, I mean it’s not only open source but it’s open in the sense that [it] allows for continuous expansion, much like other internet protocols.”

Meanwhile, the “software stack runs on nodes,” she pointed out. Those nodes  “allow the network to continue expanding [and] the software’s the same on every node…. It’s also designed to be content native and inherently fast.”

She added: “What that means is that it’s highly appropriate for ultra-low latency live sports in premium VOD with 4K content.”

Also, she noted: “The architecture allows for content to be inherently reused…. That makes it very hyper efficient, and … it just saves a ton on resources, and also cost.”

The security being used, meanwhile, is “quite different than what we’ve done in the past with content, where the content has really been put into secured environments, rather than being self-protecting,” she said.

The strategy is being “used in consumer streaming with secure” digital rights management (DRM) content [and] it integrates that kind of technology directly into the protocol itself and makes that dramatically simpler and also more secure,” she noted. Last, she said, is it’s also “transparent [because] it’s a blockchain protocol.”

She went on to say that, “being a protocol that is built with content ownership intrinsic, a trustless encryption model and re-encryption model, on-chain rights control and versioning, it ends up being tamper-proof by design, which is something that we all want to aspire to and is also essential on the other side to open up these sort of new video economy possibilities.”

Ken Gerstein, VP of sales at NAGRA Anti-Piracy and NexGuard, also participated in the session.

Produced by MESA, the Content Production Summit was presented by Fortinet, and sponsored by Convergent Risks, Friend MTS, Amazon Studios Technology, Indee, NAGRA, EIDR, and Eluv.io, in association with CDSA and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS).