Googling indicates that beIN has started using ASiD which seems to be the state-of-the-art in digital watermarking at the point of receiving (the beIN set-top box). I wonder if beIN is still being pirated effectively with this new deterrence.

> ASiD is a true step change in the fight against video piracy. Its combination of discrete identifying symbols, fractional second display and sophisticated placement, and interpretation algorithms make it impossible to obscure or mask with zero impact on the consumer experience.

Anytime somebody says impossible in a statement, you know it's marketing talk. Just off the cuff, what of simply taking multiple accounts, synchronizing them based on keyframe similarity, and then sampling from the accounts at random, applying an invisible distortion filter, and broadcasting?

Seems like a fun technical problem to solve. It's certainly a cat and mouse game, but in this case I think the odds are stacked in favor of the mouse, as this sort of task seems like child's play compared to the work that e.g. video game crackers go through and in that case the crackers have negligible resources whereas this station has vast resources.

Interesting. Given the negligible delay of 10 seconds, perhaps they did create processing clusters to do the pipeline of what you suggested.

More from the marketing brochure:

> The only requirement outside of the client-side embedder library is the installation of a video fingerprint generator appliance in close time proximity to the video encoder. Operating independently of the encoder on a copy of the signal, signatures are calculated and other frame analyses are performed to enable precise triggering and recovery of the identifying symbols.

I'm sure they did, but 10 seconds isn't "negligible" (if you've ever watched the superbowl in an apartment building on a hot day you'll know what i mean)

Yeah but if your entire country/region is on that same 10-second delay, then it might as well be live.

do a binary chop - turn on a 1 pixel watermark in 1/2 the 1/4, 1/8 .....

This is likely a satellite broadcast signal. That signal is encrypted, and the watermark is inserted by the decoder. If the decoder gets hacked they have no options.

(disclaimer: I used to build set top boxes doing satellite/cable protocol stuff ...)

they start by uploading new firmware to the decoder and changing it to only accept signed images (I bet they already do this, up to date firmware typically runs on a slow carousel on each satellite transponder)

Once you have your code in control on all your valid boxes you can switch the crypto - either the hacked box falls off the crypto and stops working or it does your watermarking - you can send EMMs to all the boxes telling them to identify themselves - blink out their box id in a random pixel somewhere (or do the binary thing mentioned above) - once you have that you send them an EMM to shut off their crypto

I did network consulting for one such organisation. Their management had taken the following -utterly brilliant- decisions in succession.

1. They got hacked, didn't respond.

2. Someone used the (published) hack to make cheaper decoder boxes. Management decided to sell these hacked, rather than the genuine ones. Or to put it another way, they screwed up logistics of their own boxes to the point that they decided to sell someone else's boxes.

3. Someone started rebroadcasting their signal. First on the internet, eventually on actual radio waves.

Because of 2) they couldn't turn off the hacker's signal. And they didn't want to because this would mean "taking a loss" to shareholders (ie. admitting the financial consequences of their own disastrous past decisions).

So "for business reasons" it may not be as simple as redoing the encryption.

BeoutQ will just get more paid subscription boxes and start mixing them.

im sure crafty people can figure out ways of removing or otherwise obfuscating this.

Sure, but they only need to figure out which subscriber it is and start replacing his screen with content that is sure to infuriate their customers.

Of course this requires people who actually have the technical capability to do this. These are in VERY short supply in the middle east, so likely this company is purely a financial construction that outsources all it's technical stuff to the lowest bidder, which itself is a company that bought the system long ago from someone else.

So it is simple, or at least straightforward with no unknowns, provided you can work with the technology you're using.

This is the only state-sponsored pirate TV I’ve ever heard of. Makes it really tough when the entity doing the stealing is a sovereignty.

It's yet another strange manifestation of "cyberwarfare". Since there's no international agreements restricting it we're only going to see more. Controlling what another country's citizens watch (and how much they pay for it!) is a lot of power.

(See also Facebook's sudden decision to ban foreign political ads in the Irish referendum)

for sure -- though it's hard for me to feel too bad for a state-sponsored TV channel when the feed is stolen by state-sponsored pirate.

AIUI industrial-scale broadcast piracy is also the norm within Iran

I suspect the article is simplifying.

If multiple channels are involved (the article mentions "10 beoutQ channels"), it is quite possible they have worked out how to compromise the conditional access on the broadcast, allowing the stream to be viewed,processed (and rebroadcast) without the mandated set-top box, and avoiding any client-side watermarking.

Various Pay TV conditional access (read: encryption) have been cracked over the years, it wouldn't surprise me if there are undisclosed 0days floating around.

Surely they could do an overlay like what channels already put in with their logo, with a couple-pixel discrepancy (an 8x8 pixel shape with only 10% opacity or something) that translates to a user ID. Forums have been doing similar for close to a decade to figure out which user leaks info (we do it on some EVE Online forums).

The pirate could take the median pixels of many different feeds to clean out the fingerprint.