Audio Video News

HDR improves picture quality but also makes content more tempting to steal. Writes a Fox studio executive in Multichannel News: “Fox’s experience is that the moment a high-quality pirate source becomes available, it immediately becomes much more popular than lower-quality sources such as theater camcorders or ‘ordinary’ HD sources, and is therefore a bigger threat to our legitimate business.”

Six studios joined to publish a Specification for Enhanced Content Protection in 2013. The next step may be forensic watermarking, which enables pirate booty to be traced back to the weak link in a distribution system, and thus enables warnings to both pirates and consumers. This approach has brought “significant delays in piracy of high-quality sources” in South Korea.