CDSA

Between the global pandemic reiterating the need for quality video content and also accelerating media and entertainment industry changes with new business, distribution and production models, there has never been a more critical time for M&E organizations to secure high-value content assets in the production and post-production pre-release stages, according to NAGRA and Vision Media.

“We’ve seen a lot of changes, I would say, over the past eight years from more of a reliance [on] digital screeners and less and less [on] physical media,” Ken Gerstein, VP of sales for NAGRA Anti-Piracy and NexGuard, said Dec. 16 at the Content Protection Summit (CPS) ) event, during the session “Always-on Security: The Importance of Watermarking in Production and Post-Production.”

During the session, he and Jason Deadrich, Vision Media CTO, stressed the importance of always-on security for pre-release content.

Vision Media was initially a physical media company, at first sending out promotional content to theaters and later evolving to start shipping out DVD screeners and different types of content for its studio partners, Deadrich recalled. Ultimately, the company “transitioned to” digital media, he noted.

All the content that Vision Media handles is “considered high-value in one way or another,” much of it pre-release content, Deadrich said, noting it doesn’t deal with much free or publicly-accessible content. To protect the content, the company uses two-factor authentication, multiple levels of digital rights management (DRM), dedicated applications, geo-blocking and forensic watermarking “from start to finish,” he pointed out.

One challenge that Deadrich is seeing among new content companies entering the sector is “they’re not aware of kind of what they’re doing by turning” off certain security features on their content after a certain period of time, he said.

“There’s a lot of new players that are coming to us on a regular basis because content is growing – content is kind of exploding,” Deadrich said. But there are “a lot of streaming platforms out there that don’t necessarily treat content as high value,” he noted, adding: “Streaming media is not all the same and I think it’s important for people to understand it’s not just a technology player, it’s not just a commodity. Content is different certainly.”

Locking Down Your “Crown Jewels”

“It’s only a small percentage of people that may be a threat to your content or to your platform,” according to Gerstein. Therefore, he said: “You want to lock down your crown jewels as much as you can and, most of the time, there’s never an incident or an event. But if you don’t have the security always on, you open yourself to vulnerabilities.”

And the content should be locked down using a combination of encryption, DRM and two-factor authentication, along with having “traceability in the event of a leak so you can potentially find the actors that are behind it and also deter future attacks on your content,” he explained.

Moderator Guy Finley, MESA president, asked the panelists why always-on security is so important in production and post production.

“It’s always been important,” according to Gerstein. But he said: “I think that, as the workflows have become more and more digital, there’s more remote collaboration [and] there are teams that are editing and mastering in different locations on the same piece of content. And then there’s a lot of workflows that are migrating to the cloud as well. You need to have more security because people potentially are getting access that are not in the same room with you.”

That shift during the pandemic to remote work has “raised the awareness of security in every workflow,” Gerstein added.

And what is accelerating the need for this protection?

“There’s no doubt things are moving to digital at a much more rapid pace than ever before certainly because people want to [work] remote,” according to Deadrich.

Noting that his company does a lot of award screener content, Deadrich said the award season has been getting longer and he envisions that trend to continue. More organizations are also going digital to meet the demands of their clients.

The Shift to HD

“Before the pandemic, there was a reluctance to shift away from physical by all the guilds,” according to Gerstein. An added benefit from going digital for awards screeners is “they’ve gotten a bump up in quality,” he said.

There was some consideration before the pandemic about shifting to Blu-ray from DVD, he noted. But “that never happened because of the cost and other security concerns about a high-quality Blu-ray that was out there in an early release” stage for at least some films, he said.

However, with the shift to digital, people are now getting a high-definition (HD) version of the movie on screeners, and “the higher the quality, the more in demand it is for pirates,” he warned.

That’s added to the “urgency to have this always-on security for any award screener” and any early-release content being viewed remotely, he said. Organizations must assume there are people who will leak the content or make a copy of it, he added.

The “Collapsing” Window

“We’re also seeing the delivery windows collapsing,” according to Deadrich. Longer lead times on releases used to be needed because of the time it took to replicate, author and master discs, he said.

The five-day window that used to be typical has “turned into now,” Deadrich added.

Meanwhile, “as pirates have evolved to go after the content and have come up with ways to circumvent security that’s out there, the industry as a whole, from the anti-piracy/monitoring side and from the technology side as well, has to respond quickly to address holes in particular devices, holes in DRM that may come up,” Gerstein said.

There is also a green angle to this, according to Deadrich, who noted there is less waste from physical media now.

The Future

“If you look at any given piece of content, whether the post [production] is done on-prem or in the cloud, you need to be able to track, at any given time, every single individual or vendor that’s working on that content,” according to Gerstein. “We’re getting there. We’re not there yet. But that’s what you really need.”

Another issue that needs to be addressed: The user experience must be made “seamless” to viewers because people expect the ease of use of Netflix now, according to Deadrich. Otherwise, many people won’t view the content, he warned.

To view the full presentation, click here.

The Content Protection Summit was open to remote attendees worldwide using MESA’s recently introduced metaverse environment, the Rendez.Vu-powered MESAverse, an interactive 3D-world that allows for hybrid live and virtual events.

The event was produced by MESA, presented by IBM Security and Synamedia, sponsored by Convergent Risks, Richey May Technology Solutions, PacketFabric, archTIS, Code42, INTRUSION, NAGRA, StoneTurn and Vision Media.