NAGRA, a Kudelski Group company and the world’s leading independent provider of content protection and multiscreen television solutions, on August 31 announced that United Cloud, the innovation center of the United Group, the leading multi-play telecoms and media provider in South East Europe, has selected NAGRA’s NexGuard Watermarking to expand its security solution, ensuring OTT content protection for all United Group’s assets.

As part of the provider’s OTT content protection expansion, NAGRA’s NexGuard watermarking ensures United Group’s protection of all types of content assets, while keeping pirates at bay.

The incorporation of NAGRA’s agile, stable, and high-performance offering into United Group’s OTT distribution chain includes server-side watermarking deployed on their private cloud.

As a result, United Group is now able to shut down piracy at the source and in real-time.

As per the company’s press release, NexGuard forensic video watermarking solutions are used by major pay-TV operators and DTC services to deter and combat piracy, particularly for premium VOD and live sports.

NAGRA helps to identify the source of a content leak quickly and efficiently so that effective anti-piracy action can be taken.

NexGuard forensic watermarks can be applied at a consumer session and set-top box device level to pinpoint the source of a piracy leak including those used to feed illicit streaming servers, enabling appropriate anti-piracy action.

Sergej Berišaj, CTO of United Cloud, said, “After performing a series of due diligence tests, where we have determined imperceptibility of NAGRA’s watermarks, we were also impressed with the speed of leak detection and ease of client-side integration in our device footprint, along with fast integration of NAGRA’s NexGuard with our in-house Gladiator anti-piracy platform. NAGRA was the obvious choice to fill our OTT security needs now and in the future.”

Olivier Mett, SVP EMEA region at NAGRA, “OTT is the future, and NAGRA is playing a key role in the industry to protect that future. With our NexGuard forensic watermarking, we bring a unique combination of stability, performance, and ease of integration that has been proven to protect our customer’s business models by identifying piracy sources and shutting them down quickly.”