Friend MTS Launches 4th Generation ASiD – Enhanced Watermarking Solutions to Protect Valuable Live and VOD Entertainment Content from Piracy

Content Owners, Broadcasters, and Operators Tackle Real-World Piracy At-Scale with End-to-End Technology

PHILADELPHIA, PA & BIRMINGHAM, UK – March 24, 2021 – Friend MTS, a leading global provider of content protection services, has launched 4th Generation ASiD, an enhanced and extended set of subscriber-level watermarking solutions that address a wide range of content protection scenarios to secure high-value content and revenue across all types of broadcast and OTT devices, clients and apps. With an increasing need for content owners, broadcasters, and operators to tackle real-world piracy, Friend MTS has also included ASiD OTT Edge-switched, a new smart server-side A/B variant solution with an additional robust method of watermarking premium content that works to protect Live and VOD assets from illegal redistribution. The announcement was made today by Jonathan Friend, Chief Executive Officer, Friend MTS.

“We are at the forefront of developing and deploying real world end-to-end content protection solutions at scale for our valuable sports and entertainment customers, which is important now more than ever as the pandemic continues to shape the piracy landscape as well as the technology needs to combat this prevalent issue,” said Jonathan Friend. “Developed to meet the moment, we are thrilled to introduce our 4th Generation ASiD watermarking and monitoring solutions with enhancements to help our customers protect their valuable content in a larger industry effort to drive subscriber growth and safeguard revenue.”

Friend MTS’ advanced subscriber identification watermarking (ASiD) is the most widely deployed and actively used subscriber-level technology in the world, now with 4th Generation ASiD enhancements that include:

• ASiD Embedded (Enhanced): Offers accelerated watermark generation in certain devices (especially those without functional FPUs), and optimisations to enable memory and CPU-efficient watermark parameters for different content types (UHD, HD, linear channels vs on-demand content, etc).
• ASiD OTT Client-composited (Enhanced): Introduces a new collaboration mechanism between headend and client, and improved intelligence feedback to take action on bad actors. The solution now offers higher precision of session identification and stronger support for cloud PVR, as well as a new feature to enable variable per-device watermark parameters for different content and playback types to enable optimised watermark compositing based on individual client devices’ capabilities.
• ASiD OTT Edge-switched (New): Based on the proprietary algorithms, ASiD OTT Edge-switched benefits from other Friend MTS best-in-class mature technologies and offers accelerated watermark extraction working in conjunction with the company’s distributor-level watermarking solution, Distribution iD.

The new and enhanced 4th Generation ASiD solutions remain fully compliant with the MovieLabs Specification for Enhanced Content Protection, including 4K/UHD and HDR content, and provide robust Live and VOD content protection.

As a family of advanced forensic watermarking solutions, Friend MTS’ ASiD OTT offerings share the optional ASiD iQ enhancement that monitors for fraudulent user behaviour, flags bad actors, and enables content owners and service operators to react in real-time. As a result, Friend MTS proactively prevents content theft and other business-affecting activities such as credential or account sharing by revoking access to compromised accounts.