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The company Civolution has received an Emmy for developing a technology to fight movie piracy. Civolution was formerly part of Dutch electronics giant Philips and has received the prize during CES, currently held in Las Vegas.

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Civolution develops a technology it calls Nexguard that adds special watermarks to movies and series similar to that of the better known Cinavia that’s developed by the American company Verance. Nexguard seems to be more targeted for protecting pre-release content, while Cinavia protects a large array of generally available movies.

The watermarks inserted by Civolution Nexguard should prevent privacy and are added to movies and series that are distributed amongst press and trade press that often get viewings of content before the general public. To get early access they need to sign a contract and when there’s a leak nevertheless, the watermarks of Civolution are able to easily identify the source.

The watermarks of Civolution are invisible and unnoticeable and added to the video and audio of movies. This way the watermark can always be detected no matter how much movie pirates change the movie.

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Recently a number of movies leaked before they appeared in movie theaters. Amongst them were The Revenant and The Hateful Eight, thanks to the watermark on one of the leaked movies the source of the leak was quickly found.

Both Nexguard and Cinavia appear to be derivative work of Cinefence, originally developed by Philips.