Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) becomes the first free-to-air broadcaster to watermark content

NAGRA, a Kudelski Group (SIX:KUD.S) company and the world’s leading independent provider of content protection and multiscreen television solutions, today announced that Radio Televisione Italiana (RAI), the Italian national public broadcasting company, is leveraging NAGRA’s NexGuard forensic watermarking and Anti-Piracy Services Platform to protect its streaming content and related advertising revenues.

As a Free-to-Air (FTA) national public service provider, RAI is one of the major content producers and broadcasters in Italy operating numerous terrestrial television channels and radio stations. With production budgets going up worldwide and consumer demand rising, original scripted and entertainment content needs to be protected against illicit content sharing and re-streaming to prevent revenue loss.

In line with the evolving industry landscape, NAGRA forensic watermarking and anti-piracy solutions are delivering innovative ways to secure content and advertising revenues for content owners, broadcasters and service providers. For RAI, NAGRA’s solution inserts NexGuard forensic watermarks into the broadcaster’s content available to consumers via the RAI OTT web and app service.

The NAGRA Anti-Piracy Services platform is also leveraged, providing the crawling engine to monitor the web and pirate IPTV services, searching for
illegal publications of the original content. The crawled content is then inspected to detect watermarks and validate when content is illegally
redistributed. The solution also provides valuable data insights of illict activity that enables actionable business decisions. The result is a
comprehensive solution that ensures complete coverage against illicit attacks on valuable content.

‘Our watermarking-based anti-piracy solutions are essential for RAI to effectively monitor copyright infringements and secure the value of the content distributed over OTT/AVOD,’ said Thierry Legrand, SVP Sales EMEA at NAGRA. ‘Like many other customers, RAI relies on NAGRA’s strong reputation in media content security and anti-piracy expertise to not only understand the current challenges the industry is facing, but more importantly provide the necessary tools and solutions needed to keep pirates at bay.’

NAGRA’s NexGuard forensic watermarking protects a content owner’s and pay-TV operator’s content investment against illicit attacks by identifying the source of a content leak quickly and effectively so that decisive anti-piracy action can be taken. NAGRA’s world-leading anti-piracy services can be combined with the NexGuard forensic watermarking technology and the NexGuard Detection service to provide an effective force against the most advanced content pirates. Bloomberg