A decent, per-user watermarking system is seriously something that would
perk up the interest of a lot of people both inside the BBC and in the
wider media community. Thanks for the link, that article is an
interesting description of the tech. I think the people here who are
right into this stuff have heard of Streamburst, and that there are
other people doing similar things, but I'll check to make sure.
If someone can come up with a massively scaleable way of watermarking
content for individual users as they stream or download content, and
(just as importantly) a fraud-detection system of some sort that notices
clips on YouTube, BitTorrent etc and detects the watermarks in them so
that we can enforce the membership rules, then we could be a step closer
to an alternative to DRM.
Of course a big factor is that individually treating up the files as
they are streamed/downloaded would be much more hardware-intensive than
simply encrypting something once and then offering it up for download
via a DRM system. So cost effectiveness is definitely an issue.
Brendan.
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The story was linked to on slashdot, here:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/19/1918221 , so the tech
community is already having a discussion about it. In my opinion,
watermarking is a much better way to go about things than DRM, and I hope
you guys at the beeb eventually decide to go that way, and abandon
technology that just makes life harder for us as consumers, but doesn't
hinder the pirates one iota.
