RAI becomes first free-to-air broadcaster to watermark content

Radio Televisione Italiana (RAI), the Italian national public broadcaster, is leveraging Nagra’s NexGuard forensic watermarking and Anti-Piracy Services platform to protect its streaming content and related advertising revenues.

As a free-to-air national public service provider, RAI is one of the major content producers and broadcasters in Italy operating numerous terrestrial television channels and radio stations. With production budgets going up worldwide and consumer demand rising, original scripted and entertainment content needs to be protected against illicit content sharing and re-streaming to prevent revenue loss. For RAI, Nagra’s solution inserts NexGuard forensic watermarks into the broadcaster’s content available to consumers via the RAI OTT web and app service.

Nagra’s Anti-Piracy Services platform is also leveraged, providing the crawling engine to monitor the web and pirate IPTV services, searching for illegal publications of the original content. The crawled content is then inspected to detect watermarks and validate when content is illegally redistributed. The solution also provides data insights into illicit activity that enables actionable business decisions.

“Our watermarking-based anti-piracy solutions are essential for RAI to effectively monitor copyright infringements and secure the value of the content distributed over OTT/AVOD,” said Thierry Legrand, SVP sales EMEA at Nagra. “Like many other customers, RAI relies on Nagra’s strong reputation in media content security and anti-piracy expertise to not only understand the current challenges the industry is facing, but more importantly provide the necessary tools and solutions needed to keep pirates at bay.”