Eventive + Nagra
From ticketing to streaming
Eventive was determined to find a streaming alternative, but soon discovered that a complete solution for a virtual festival experience did not exist and they would need to build their own. In April 2020, the Eventive Virtual platform launched with studio-grade multi-DRM protection and grew exponentially to serve millions of viewers. In parallel, a major surge in online piracy was observed in the early days of (and throughout) the pandemic. Eventive’s success brought new challenges, as their ability to deliver the highest quality, most in-demand film screenings also drew the attention of digital pirates and it quickly became clear that a level of security beyond DRM was needed to fully protect their clients’ content and bottom line. This was an urgent situation that required a swift integration into their existing platform and after evaluating available options, NAGRA multi-DRM and NexGuard forensic watermarking paired with Bitmovin’s encoder emerged as the best combined solution to reduce their time to market and securely elevate their clients’ and viewers’ experience.
A higher standard of security and quality
“COVID-19 accelerated the need for these solutions,” said Sander Van Leeuwen, Commercial Director at NAGRA. “When in-person gatherings completely stopped and events went virtual, an opportunity was created, but the downside was a higher risk for piracy and that needed to be addressed.” NAGRA is a global leader in security and media solutions for the delivery of digital and interactive content, with a suite of rights management, watermarking, and cybersecurity solutions. NAGRA NexGuard is among the most mature and robust forensic watermarking solutions available, and when deployed with a server-side A/B approach, can scale to any size audience, making it a natural fit for the Eventive platform. “NAGRA offers the most secure content protection technology available for content streaming, making their solutions the obvious choice to protect our films and ensure an unmatched online experience for audiences and organizers alike,” said Eventive Cofounder, Iddo Patt. With NAGRA Multi-DRM managing access and NexGuard deterring and catching illicit activity, Eventive would have a complete solution for protecting the revenue and integrity of their service in place, but to make this workflow possible, NexGuard forensic watermarking needed to be integrated with the Bitmovin encoder.
The integration details
The Bitmovin encoder utilizes cloud-based, split-and-stitch technology to divide the video into many small chunks that can be processed in parallel, dramatically reducing encoding times. It also employs Per-Title optimization, analyzing and customizing the adaptive bitrate ladder for each piece of content, delivering remarkable quality without wasted overhead data. Eventive’s Patt shared, “Obviously we are looking to provide the highest quality viewing experience and are very excited about the per-title optimization and UHD components of the Bitmovin encoder.” Bitmovin’s Encoding Product Manager, Markus Hafellner added, “4K content really benefits from our split-and-stitch architecture and can be processed almost 100x faster than real time.” All-in-all, Bitmovin’s encoder was the perfect choice, with parallel processing creating the A and B variants of the video segments in the requested resolutions, codec (H264, HEVC) and bitrates.
Customer Testimonial
“Piracy is a global issue and we are strong supporters of alliances and collaboration. Everyone in the value chain is affected and has a role, so it’s critical for content owners, rights holders and technology providers to come together in the fight.”
– Sander Van Leeuwen Commercial Director, NAGRA