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That's neat. Lots of broadcasters do something similar (display a number on the screen) when they are broadcasting sports events etc to detect streaming. I'd l

by jmkni 8y ago

That's neat. Lots of broadcasters do something similar (display a number on the screen) when they are broadcasting sports events etc to detect streaming. I'd love to know how that works. Presumably they broadcast the same thing to everybody, so is it actually the box/receiver which adds the number to the screen? Does everybody get a unique number, or do groups of people get the same one?

detaro 8y ago
Here's some marketing materials from a company selling this: https://dtv.nagra.com/watermarking https://dtv.nagra.com/watermarking - seems like yes, one option is software in the receiver.
- nickysielicki 8y ago
  If anyone is interested in getting an in-depth look at how satellite TV boxes work, this 33c3 talk is awesome: https://youtu.be/ex_dEEh4dl0 https://youtu.be/ex_dEEh4dl0
corint 8y ago
For Sky TV in the UK, the Sky TV satellite boxes occasionally display the subscriber number in a faint font just above the channel logo in the top-right. If you've simply hooked up the satellite decoder to a video capture device with a view to streaming sports content, then your subscriber number just gets occasionally shown on the stream too. So no doubt there's a specific "when" for the subscriber number being shown, and it's a case of finding & watching as many streams as possible to see how many of them feature the subscriber number. Gotcha!
- davb 8y ago
  BT TV do it with a base64-encoded subscriber account ID on the top right (easily recognisable due to the '=' padding characters).
Maxious 8y ago
Apparently state level actors can defeat the watermarking... > “There’s nothing else like it in the world,” Esteban Israel, beIN’s executive director of technology, said of beoutQ’s level of sophistication. “We work with all the top technology vendors, technology developers. We have our experts, we deploy state of the art technologies and we have not seen this anywhere else.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/sports/bein-sports-qatar-beoutq.html?smid=matthewkeyslive https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/sports/bein-sports-qatar-...
- akersten 8y ago
  The image of some crack antipiracy team hanging out in a war room is just so ridiculous to me. They say it's an individual subscriber's stream being rebroadcast, who has somehow managed to remove the watermark? Alright, just blank the stream for a few frames for half of your customers while watching the illicit stream. Binary search until you find the culprit subscriber. Even if you had 100 million subscribers it would only take 27 iterations to find. No one is going to mind or probably even notice that their screen flickers a few times. Instead they've put together a team of highly-paid professionals bumbling about that they can't possibly figure out who is behind all this. While it may be slightly more complicated in the real world, I suspect it's simply a case of justifying their own overpaid positions.

by jmkni 8y ago

detaro 8y ago

Here's some marketing materials from a company selling this: https://dtv.nagra.com/watermarking https://dtv.nagra.com/watermarking - seems like yes, one option is software in the receiver.

nickysielicki 8y ago
If anyone is interested in getting an in-depth look at how satellite TV boxes work, this 33c3 talk is awesome: https://youtu.be/ex_dEEh4dl0 https://youtu.be/ex_dEEh4dl0

corint 8y ago

For Sky TV in the UK, the Sky TV satellite boxes occasionally display the subscriber number in a faint font just above the channel logo in the top-right. If you've simply hooked up the satellite decoder to a video capture device with a view to streaming sports content, then your subscriber number just gets occasionally shown on the stream too. So no doubt there's a specific "when" for the subscriber number being shown, and it's a case of finding & watching as many streams as possible to see how many of them feature the subscriber number. Gotcha!

davb 8y ago
BT TV do it with a base64-encoded subscriber account ID on the top right (easily recognisable due to the '=' padding characters).

Maxious 8y ago

Apparently state level actors can defeat the watermarking... > “There’s nothing else like it in the world,” Esteban Israel, beIN’s executive director of technology, said of beoutQ’s level of sophistication. “We work with all the top technology vendors, technology developers. We have our experts, we deploy state of the art technologies and we have not seen this anywhere else.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/sports/bein-sports-qatar-beoutq.html?smid=matthewkeyslive https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/09/sports/bein-sports-qatar-...

akersten 8y ago
The image of some crack antipiracy team hanging out in a war room is just so ridiculous to me. They say it's an individual subscriber's stream being rebroadcast, who has somehow managed to remove the watermark? Alright, just blank the stream for a few frames for half of your customers while watching the illicit stream. Binary search until you find the culprit subscriber. Even if you had 100 million subscribers it would only take 27 iterations to find. No one is going to mind or probably even notice that their screen flickers a few times. Instead they've put together a team of highly-paid professionals bumbling about that they can't possibly figure out who is behind all this. While it may be slightly more complicated in the real world, I suspect it's simply a case of justifying their own overpaid positions.