The firm based in Stockholm, Sweden, Edgeware even suggests that OTT services can offer higher resolution, although that is more debatable and depends on factors including device capability and available bandwidth.

The main point though is that video service providers in general can exploit emerging products to achieve higher levels of personalization on a one to one basis for both recommendations and targeted advertising to connected devices, while exploiting forensic watermarking to defend against illicit stream redistribution.

In Edgeware’s case key products include the latest version of Ad Enabler, a dynamic ad insertion tool that allows content distributors to insert glitch-free personalized adverts using frame-accurate segmentation from the server side. Edgeware claims this is one of the first such products to support live OTT ad insertion using the MPEG-DASH standard, which is the native format for Android devices.

Then on the origin side, products include Edgeware’s software-based TV Content Capture and TV Repackager, which together enable operators and content owners to create a library of TV content and provide ingest, live-to-VOD and cloud DVR functions. They also facilitate streaming TV content in different formats to multiple device types.

Then on the security front, Edgeware is demonstrating forensic watermarking technology provided by French specialist in this field ContentArmor. Edgeware announced at IBC 2017 that it was integrating ContentArmor’s bitstream-based forensic watermarking solution into its TV CDN technology. This inserts information into the video bitstream such that it is imperceptible to the viewer yet robust enough to withstand video transformations such as recompression and cropping.

Integrating this into Edgeware’s CDN technology allows every stream to have a different code embedded at the edge of the network without any extra processing, so that each viewer has a unique identifiable version of the content.