Delivery of Live Watermarked Video in CDN: Fast and Scalable Algorithms

To address the problem of illegal re-streaming of video streams, existing solutions are based on watermarking the legal video to track the leak users who re-stream the stream on illegal platform. However, these solutions do not aim at tracking leaks as fast as possible, nor are adaptive to the number of users. We present a CDN-based adaptive delivery architecture for watermarked streaming. We propose an algorithm to generate unique sequences of watermarks for the legal delivery. This algorithm is adaptive in the number of users and optimal for the time needed to detect the leak. It meets the demand of live video providers who do not know in advance the number of clients for a stream. Our algorithm copes with thousands of new clients per seconds and enables leak detection in less than five minutes with only five watermarks for live video streams watched by one billion of clients.