When you stream a video, from Netflix or Hulu or YouTube or HBO Go or whatever else you have on hand, there's a basic assumption: That video is for you to watch, and just that once. Maybe you share it with whoever else is in the room at the time, but it's given with the condition that you're just taking it in as a one-off right there, not saving it forever, not rebroadcasting it somewhere else. It's how the system works and how the deals are made.

But even with paywalls and user names and passwords, even though that stream might be broken up by ads, there's a pristine piece of video somewhere in the code—unadulterated video beamed down from whatever server. A stream that, if you really wanted to, you could find a way to rip to your hard drive and upload to The Pirate Bay. A stream you could broadcast back out again, with your own ads up against it. That's just the way that it goes.

But what if that video had your name right there in it?

That's what SafeStream—a new product from the company MediaSilo—is able to do. It simply allows a streaming service (or any other company that works with video) to burn images or text onto the very video itself in close to real time. It's not just some overlay like the banner ads you can spot popping over the bottom of a YouTube video, it is actually part of the video, as irremovable as Ben Affleck in Batman vs. Superman.

It may not seem like that big of a feat, but if you consider the numbers, you can see how the work—and time—begins to add up. Watermarking a whole video requires modifying each and every frame it contains individually. Each frame doesn't take a huge amount of time to process, but even milliseconds add up over the course of hundreds of thousands of frames.

Take a 90-minute feature film, for instance. That film is 5,400 seconds long. The general frame-rate for a movie is 24 frames per second, which brings your total frame-count up to 129,600. And in other mediums—video game streams and, increasingly, adult films—the frame-rate can be as high as 60 frames per second.

The more involved the watermark is, the longer the process of editing each frame takes, and the end result is that if you're working with a single computer, you'll be hard-pressed to accomplish anything in a reasonable amount of time. As Kai Pradel, Founder and CEO of MediaSilo explained over the phone, "You take a 90-minute file and you want to watermark it using Adobe Media Encoder that means you're looking at 40 to 50 minutes. Maybe you can get to half of real time, but that's about as fast as you're going to get it."

The result is video that can have tailor-made data burned onto it with only a modest delay.

SafeStream manages to cut that time down, not by making the actual process of burning text or an image onto every single frame of a video any more efficient at its most granular level, but by harnessing cloud computing to do it more efficiently. "We segment that file into 4-second chunks, and distribute those 4-second segments to 1,350 servers." The result is video that can have tailor-made data burned onto it with a modest delay—fifteen or so seconds on top of the standard load time—and no need to have oodles of computing power just waiting around in-house.

If that solution sounds fairly obvious, that's in part because it is. The difficulty just comes in directing the traffic: dicing up the video and delegating its chunks to the right places then calling them back and smashing them together again. Not to mention the business-side challenge of having access to all this processing power when you need it, without ever having to pay for it to just sit idle, just burning money. Managing all that is Safestream's specialty.

So what becomes possible when you can seamlessly modify video streams in real time? One of the first, obvious applications could be battling piracy.

Downloading copies of ripped DVDs off The Pirate Bay is only one of the many, many facets of modern piracy, and there is a whole sub-genre that revolves around hijacking video streams. Take, for instance, a cable subscriber who streams an expensive pay-per-view event on the internet for free, with his own ads plastered all over it. Or a subscriber to an adult website who copies its films onto one of the internet's countless, famous, free-to-watch alternatives where he can get a cut of the advertisement money per view.

In cases like these, the culprits are paying for some sort of access yes, but they're paying for themselves, not for the right to rebroadcast indiscriminately. Especially not to rebroadcast with an avalanche of ads included, enough to easily make back subscription costs but make hundreds if not thousands of dollars on top, depending on how many eyes they can pull.

Personalized watermarking can point blinking arrow at high-profile pirates.

Personalized on-demand watermarking, even at its most aggressive and egregious, can't do anything to stop this behavior, but it can discourage it by pointing a large blinking arrow at high-profile offenders. If your name and subscriber information appears burned into the center of the screen for even just a few intermittent frames every few minutes, it serves as an unavoidable scarlet letter identifying the specific source of a leak, allowing sites to at least cancel subscribers who turn around and rebroadcast, if not pursue legal action.

Of course a giant screaming watermark is not only super annoying to the wide audience of totally innocent watchers too, but would also let pirates know exactly what they need to crop out, or where they should blur. But the letter doesn't even need to be scarlet. Watermarks could pop up unavoidably but rarely, for a flash of a frame or two ever few seconds. Or it could go completely invisible. "We can use the same watermarking approach to embed invisible watermarks," Pradel says. Pirate streamers might not even know there was anything to avoid, while normal people would suffer no real annoyance.

Pradel sees the applications moving far beyond piracy protection for streaming services . Movie studios could automatically and invisibly watermark production footage on its way through file-transfer services, in hopes of tracking any potentially pre-release leak from The Pirate Bay all the way back to the specific workstations it came from and/or likely culprits that leaked it.

Or instead of loading in video ads from other websites—which can be laggy and slow and sometimes freeze your otherwise speedy stream—streaming services could actually embed ads directly into the videos they're sending down to users. "We could have the ads be part of the actual content," Pradel says. This sort of embedded advertising wouldn't just be invulnerable to ad-blocking, but could also make webpages much faster to load by reducing the number of unreliable third parties they have to rely on for ad streams.

You'll be forgiven if some of this strikes you as a little Draconian. It's unpleasant to imagine huge, aggressive watermarks across your Netflix movies, sneering at you as a potential pirate. Or YouTube videos with banner ads burned into every every margin of the screen.

Real, practical applications of this tech would have to be subtle. A semi-transparent QR code with encoded information, just far enough into the picture that it would be annoying to crop out. Imperceptible flashes at irregular intervals, or something not even visible at all. Most important of all, any measure that lets a streaming service keep better control of its digital video will help them stop clinging to more backwards, antiquated solutions and embrace the future. Some watermarking could be well-worth being able to cut your cable.

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