I participated to a workshop on content protection organized by CCP and MPA at Convergence India 2009. It was interesting to check what the issues were in India.

The interest for content protection is rising. The other speakers were Rajiv DALAL (MPA India), Steve CHRISTIAN (Verimatrix), Sanjeev FERNANDES (NDS), Gautam GANDHI (Google India), Sanjiv KAINTH (IRDETO) and Vidar SANDVIK (CONAX). In other words, CA providers were very present at the workshop.

Rajiv gave some interesting information about India. All major US studios are investing in Indian production houses. It seems even that Will Smith will play in some Indian movies! And vice versa, Reliance is taking a foot in the US. Reliance purchase US theaters and invest in small US production houses. This may partly explain the rise of interest for content protection. US studios want to protect their financial investments.

Gautam explained the new strategy of YouTube. If a studio provides the reference movie, YouTube will filter its upload. This is a contract they have with Sony BMG India. Thus, Sony uses YouTube India to make electronic distribution in India. Surprisingly, it is still easy to find illegal copyrighted content on YouTube.

When discussing with the audience, the two main concerns seemed:

• theater piracy and mainly analog theater.
• Illegal rebroadcast of content. It seems that the pirates are well organized for crickett match (THE Indian sport). They prepare 12 STBs. they start with the first one. After a while, the broadcaster blacklists the STB (They use a visible watermark which carries a STB identifier, so called fingerprint) Then the “pirate” switches to the second STB…

When listening to all the speakers, I noted a problem. Every speaker used a different terminology for invisible watermark, session watermark, video fingerprint,… This is confusing. The industry should define a common vocabulary.