DoveRunner’s Erik Peña Talks Security at Scale for Livestreams and VOD at Streaming Media 2025
DoveRunner product manager Erik Peña discusses distributed and forensic watermarking, multi-DRM, and other aspects of the approach DoveRunner takes to protect premium live and on-demand content in this in-depth interview with Streaming Media contributing editor Timothy Fore-Siglin at Streaming Media 2025.
Distributed Watermarking vs. Forensic Watermarking
Fore-Siglin invites Peña to describe his role at DoveRunner and to share what the company does.
Peña says he is the product manager for DoveRunner’s multi-DRM solution. DoveRunner “is a complete 360 content security and application security” company. It’s focused on a combination of both live and on-demand streaming content. “Anything you can think of that you want to [use to] protect your premium content, you would use DoveRunner to protect the content with DRM. We also have forensic watermarking for detection and monitoring. We also have an anti-piracy service, and then we also have mobile app security for hardening your mobile apps,” Peña explains.
Fore-Siglin asks, "And where do you see the most traction these days? You described quite a few parts of the security process.”
Peña acknowledges that multi-DRM continues to be important to premium content companies, but he’s recently noticed “a lot more interest in forensic and distributed watermarking as well.”
“And on that distributed model, what attracts your customers or potential customers? What problem are they trying to solve?” Fore-Siglin follows up.
Distributed watermarking is a method for protecting content, Peña notes. “This is going to be more for the use case of a content house actually syndicating videos. Let’s say it’s a Hollywood studio, they want to syndicate their screener for a review. It’s a very one-off [job]; I’m going to send this particular video to this particular company or person. They want to be able to track to see, ‘Hey, where’s this video going? And if it does get leaked, who did it?’”
Forensic watermarking is useful for at scale, Peña contrasts, when many end users are involved. “Our systems are designed specifically to be able to cater towards those large audiences while keeping the storage costs relatively low.”
Casual Piracy vs. Professional Piracy
Fore-Siglin pivots to the issue of casual piracy versus professional piracy. “When you talk about the screeners though, even at that low level, say it’s an Oscar screening that’s going out, if it gets leaked to one person, … the fact [is] that if it actually gets out there, it obviously has a significant dollar impact.” He wonders what “scale” means for DoveRunner—10,000 viewers, 100,000 viewers, more than a million, etc.
“Typically it’s like 10[,000] to 100,000 viewers, but there’s nothing stopping it from scaling to millions of viewers as well,” says Peña. “The reason why the scale works for this is that when you’re generating content, be it live or on demand, you’re essentially creating two versions of that content. And so at the edge level or the CDN level, when users are able to actually request the content, they’re sending along a token that identifies them as a user, and the edge node will actually tailor that manifest with the right segments to be able to build in that user ID. And so really at that point, it doesn’t really matter the amount of people that the content’s servicing, because the content’s going to be only two different renditions of that same content.”
The Future of DRM
Fore-Siglin looks to the future: “Two years from now, where do you see security at scale, both for on-demand content and live content?”
“I think DRM is probably going to see an uptick in differentiation as far as features go,” Peña predicts. “When it comes to DRM, you have PlayReady, you have FairPlay, you have Widevine. For the most part, it’s been relatively the same. And they might make some changes along the way, but I think traditionally, they really haven’t needed to. Where I think the differences will come in is the additional features that some of these providers like us are going to put together.”
Fore-Siglin summarizes, “So stay at the base level of common encryption scheme, but move the feature sets up as differentiators for you as a company.”
“Exactly. And I think honestly, that’s probably the best way to do it at this point,” Peña replies.
Fore-Siglin asks one more question: “When we talk about that base level of common encryption scheme and building features up on top of it, is that an area where DoveRunner feels like it can play competitively?”
Peña thinks it can. “We already have those conversations and that relationship going with all three of the DRM providers right now,” he notes. “When the time comes and they do want to make additional enhancements to their schemes, we’re ready to be able to take those on as well.”
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