...or just use steganography. Steganography in videos can be made to be invisible to the naked eye, and extremely robust - even to video compression. It's also difficult to detect, and even more difficult to remove/tamper with.
What the author of the article is proposing is actually a kind of steganography, albeit a rather crude one, and probably rather difficult to implement (since scene timings will be different for each episode, and you'll need to keep a separate log of exactly which timings correspond to each person you've distributed the file to), compared to running a video through a process that embeds a steganographically hidden id pattern at each keyframe.
There will be a limit to how much compression it can take, but some methods e.g. Echo Hiding are extremely compression resistant (I've implemented this over a phoneline - it works).
No. There are algorithms out there that can survive compression[1] by encoding statistically over an image instead of just bit manipulation.
You can also embed data in the audio channel by alternating between two imperceptible echo kernels for 1/0[2]. This is extremely compression resistant.
Surely it would be possible to create encoding resistant stenography. Will the stenography be affected, sure, but it should be possible to create error-resistant stenography up to a certain point.
Stenography: encode information such that it is below the human detection threshold.
Lossy compression: discard all sub-threshold information.
Thus, in the general case it's fundamentally impossible. You can make a scheme that will survive certain known encoders and bitrates, but you can't make one that will survive all lossy compression.
Of course we have no idea if they used steganography or not, right? He bases the article on the idea that they have no tracking info except the watermark, but I don't see any evidence that they don't know more.
To be honest, when I heard that the files were protected with a watermark, I assumed that they actually meant a steganographic watermark. I thought that this tech had been adopted into the industry ages ago, I'm rather surprised if it isn't the case, given the arms-race between the media and illegal distribution.
Your initial assumption was correct, it is widely deployed in the industry, there are multiple vendors that provide fingerprinting technology that is orders of magnitude more advanced then what the article suggests.
The visible fingerprint might just have been there to deter the clueless. In any case even with a fingerprint its hard to proof without a doubt, the individual who actually stole it.
The visible fingerprint might also be there to prove intent or add circumvention charges in court.
I don't think they need to prove that a certain individual stole it. The party which received the advanced copies likely had to take on liability, so HBO can go after them. Of course, that doesn't mean they won't turn around and lean on the actual culprit, but whether or not they catch someone HBO will have their due.
Arms race? The entertainment industry has cantered out onto the jousting pitch with their horse and lance. Meanwhile illegal distribution is calibrating the laser cannons in their orbital battle station and dispatching their aircraft carrier battle groups.
I don't think "arms race" really applies when the two sides are building entirely different weapons. The entertainment industry is interested in pursuing the source of leaks - as the other comments here have mentioned, they've gotten pretty good at it.
I think you're wrong about the two sides. The guys with the orbital battle stations are the distribution channel. Watermarking isn't there to deter them, so their lasers don't matter.
Watermarking is a deterrent to the people who upload the content in the first place. The ones who're careless about who they'll share things with. A unique watermark (steganographic or visible) is about finding the source of the leak. In that arms-race the entertainment industry is facing people who can remove a watermark - but we have no idea whether or not they're winning. The fact that torrents exist with watermarks intact makes me think that perhaps they are.
The entertainment industry operates some 40 actual satellites that were put up into space using actual rockets, engages in petabyte-scale asset management as a matter of course, and constantly reworks its content acquisition pipelines as new digital and analog technologies come to market. We're a little bit more technologically sophisticated than you seem to imagine.
I remember hearing lots of noise about them offering a stand alone streaming service, I was even excited to try it out and see how it handled the traffic of a season premiere (HBOgo has been notably terribly on this front)
I googled around for about 15 minutes and was only able to find news articles announcing it. I'd be happy to pay them for what i've already watched if anyone could direct me to a sign-up for this elusive streaming service.
no arrests, i am certain that if one of these early release approved people was caught they would make a huge song and dance about it to deter others. at oscar time the screeners make it onto torrent sites with ease. if they were able to find the leakers using current methods we would know about it.
They have tracked down leakers before. The issue is that even if you get a clear cut high profile case (like howard stern[1]) then what? It is pretty hard to prove intentionality or where exactly in the chain the data went astray. These things just get left around. If a screener disappears during a party, who even knows who took it (A guest, a caterer, or did it just end up under a couch)?
I've heard of minor reviewers and third party firms getting cut off after a leak is traced to them, but for the most part the back office people simply don't have the power to enforce against anyone of note. Also the evidence just isn't enough for an actual law suit against someone who can hire a lawyer.
It it were a full-screen steganograph it would need to be subtle as to not interfere with viewing. So could that be combatted by re-compressing with another codec?
> it would need to be subtle as to not interfere with viewing
Pre-release screeners often have big ugly on-screen watermarks. Almost anything is better than a scrolling mid-screen line of text "PROPERTY OF STUDIO NAME DO NOT PIRATE THIS FILM".
Came in to say this. It's the obvious answer, and presumably the IP owners know about it even if the author of the article does not. It's also obvious that the author doesn't understand video encoding if he is proposing measuring millisecond differences in the length of specific scenes.
I wouldn't be surprised if MP4 (or other video formats) provided a mechanism for tweaking the timing of a given frame. Of course, if you're using such a primitive watermark you might as well just add a note in the metadata...
Yes, we know that. Video playback has physical constraints; a file format where image elements are sampled at irregular time intervals is obviously possible and useful for very "scientific" purposes like measuring when images are acquired and interpolating the raw data, but not reasonable for playing back on a screen with good compression and easy decompression.
Yes, I know that - I work in film and post-production for a living and I can explain the origin and workflow aspects of video frame rates to you in excruciating detail.
You know how annoying it is when you watch a movie and there's some sort of 2-dimensional 'hacker' character and s/he just says some gobbledegook about 'hacking the password' or whatever, you see something a progress bar briefly on screen, and then the actor says 'we're in!' In short, how stupid movies can be about computer topics? Well that's how it feels when someone who knows nothing about video formats or editing comes up with suggestions about adjusting the length between scenes by a few milliseconds and having it slightly different for every viewer.
This is a good time to bring up the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect(xhe).
It's where you read a page full of comments about something you really and truly deep know something about and see how very, every wrong nearly everyone is...
...then you go on to take every other page pretty seriously without remembering just how far off people were on the topic that you know about. I experienced this the other day when people were talking about beep.js on HN.
I'm not wrong. Not because such things aren't possible (duh, we have cameras that can do varying frame rates), but because I am aware that content creators contract to deliver a product that will play back properly anywhere. Distributors' deliverables lists specify the exact frame and sample rates that they want, as opposed to what's potentially achievable within the format. Handing them something encoded with variable frame rate is going to result in automatic rejection.
Here's an example of a deliverables manual, from Netflix: http://newworlddistro.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/FullTec... You will get something similar from any broadcaster or video distributor. I'm not making careless extrapolations of my knowledge here, but telling you what the industry standards are. I have long involved email conversations about these things with distributors so that stuff I submit to them doesn't get sent back, triggering contractual penalty clauses for late/non-delivery that will make a producer cross with me.
its very straightforward. video comes in frames, what happens in between frames is that the same image is being displayed for that whole time. there is no way to end a scene half way through the frame - there is no visual cue or anything.
not to mention how you would go about defining the ends of scenes...
no standard format that i am aware of has variable framerate. it makes no sense.
> and extremely robust - even to video compression. It's also difficult to detect, and even more difficult to remove/tamper with.
Split & merge frame by frame, in random, from multiple video sources. Visually they will be the same, but steganography has a high chance of been broken.
Any steganography solution on the market today that is worth its salt would actually be robust against this. The amount of different sources you would have to combine to protect against this is higher than you'd realistically be able to find.
Disclaimer: I used to work at one of the leading companies in this field.
Are you being sardonic? There are extremely obvious ways to do this particularly since they've got both space, color, sound and particularly time to play with. Unmixing signals isn't rocket science, especially if you've provided the signals that are getting mixed.
That's very interesting. I always assumed averaging (maybe with varying weights across frames and time), or applying a few rounds of other steganography, would degrade the encoded message into noise.
Could you link to some papers? If you try to encode lots and lots of messages with different keys into the video, does it ruin the quality before ruining previous messages?
I'm not sure in how much details I can go since a lot of this is behind patents and NDAs and whatnot, but just googling for "video watermarking" should already yield quite a few interesting details for you.
What the author of the article is proposing is actually a kind of steganography, albeit a rather crude one, and probably rather difficult to implement
...but easy to explain (and sell?) to the entertainment industry, who have shown themselves to be mostly technically illiterate. Some cynical, unscrupulous hacker could probably extract a lot of money from them for such a service...
It's a deterministic process, but it still has inputs. You'd have to know those inputs or test for every possible set of inputs to whatever blurring method was used.
It depends on the blurring method. If you do a gaussian blur, for example, you might be able to do a pretty good inverse blur by finding black frames and performing blind deconvolution. If I were at risk I'd use a nonlinear injective filter instead, to make sure information is lost (linear filtering is not only deterministic but perfectly without noise and no frequency response nulls).
Maybe so, but HBO isn't obligated to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Arguably if someone can't keep the screener secured from internet thieves they're still not a trustworthy guardian of the content.
This might be a very naive suggestion (I know nothing about the subject) but couldn't you just take two copies, XOR them and blank out the difference to defeat such signatures?
We're talking about images, so if you take the pixels for example they're just {0,...,255}^n, integers.
You can if you have the original file, but then what's the point?
Otherwise, take image a=original+f1, image b=original+f2. Then if you e.g. average them you still have c=original+f1/2+f2/2 -- so both signatures are kept (theoretically if either you have a large number of sources you could average the signals out of existence, or perhaps the system isn't robust and can't detect multiple sigs). This assumes the introduced signatures are indistinguishable from the source (quite reasonable).
Even if that worked (maybe it does, I don't know) you'd still have the very major obstacle of getting two potential leakers (from presumably separate publications) to find each other and collude without getting caught.
I think that could be avoided by making sure that large parts of the signatures overlap. There's probably some scheme to be able to recover which copies were used to make the leaked copy (up to some finite number of copies, but it quickly becomes impractical to get enough copies).
Over 4 separate files, depending on how they encode the IDs, you might still find out who the leakers are. They might share some bits and not others. The studio can take its time if it has a serious leaking issue.
I will say that steganography is definitely in use already, at least on feature films. (It's particularly easy in animation, where literally anything can be changed seamlessly). A film pirated from a theater (even by a camera pointing at a screen) can easily be traced to the exact theater and showing of the movie, and IR cameras in the theater permit authorities to identify the exact individual with the camera.
In short, don't try to film a movie in a theater; they will find you.
Yes. The author of the article is barging through an open door: It's very likely that those Game of Thrones episodes had individual hidden watermarking, and that using those they can tell exactly who leaked it.
The author jumped to the conclusion that those don't exist, apparently because they aren't visible (but that's the point!) and that there is a visible watermark which the author apparently assumed was the only one (but it almost certainly isn't).
I guess we all agree that watermarking the viewable content instead of thinking about securing/signing the whole data file was not so smart in the first place.
When I download a video from the Google Play Store I can only watch it for 24 hours or so. I thought there was already a highly protected digital signature/encryption system involved. Why is that not used for reporter previews?
I'm surprised they just send out DVDs with content... HBO have a streaming service, creating a preview section shouldn't be hard. Up to reporters to get a decent connection to stream...
The play store can stop you watching the content after 24 hours on the play store. It cannot possibly stop you recording your screen while it's playing and saving it forever
Preventing leaks is basically impossible, but making them traceable is possible using watermarks
Get two leaked copies, and mix them up. Use the credits from copy A, or hell, even chop off 11 milliseconds from them. Then mix and match scenes... even chop off a few ms from some randomly selected scenes.
This assumes you know the method they are using. As the post mentioned, a few milliseconds + or - at the end of a scene would not be noticeable and the overall timestamp would still be constant if "self-compensating offsets" were used.
Only if you knew that was already going on. Security by obscurity, but still, I don't believe this kind of watermarking was ever used.
Maybe something like Cinavia[1] could be used instead? It's an analog watermarking system for detecting pirated copies and refusing to play them if player detects such copy is played on something else than bluray disc. Apparently this survives transcoding, and was/is major pain for people ripping their discs for various reasons and trying to play the files on certified players.
Still, we are talking about one-shot solutions for big events, like this Game of Thrones release.
Obviously I can come up with anything and you would be able to present a strategy how to beat it. But that's not the point.
If this kind of various copyright protections become norm, people might actually be afraid to leak stuff, because you will never know how safe it is and what kind of protection you might run into. Even after analyzing spectrogram and generally watching the media multiple times, trying to find anything weird.
Well, obviously when you grab infinite number of watermarked copies, you might be able see where the irregularities are. But that's not how leaks happen.
I think this means 'gets two copies from sources who have been given their copies legitimately'. Your job is then to make sure that those two people can't be traced/identified by the watermark on/in the video.
Steganographic systems used for tracking screeners would have no problem identifying the two different sources you've used. They are robust against all sorts of attacks, timing changes and edits. Removing frames doesn't really affect this, since it's not doing dumb frame-by-frame matching. You'd have to degrade your audio and video to the point where they become unwatchable in order to remove the watermark.
Disclaimer: I used to work for one of the companies providing these systems.
It helps to be familiar with steganography; the post is basically proposing to make a unique watermark in a video by changing the starting times of each scene, and the rest of the post is mostly math to figure out how much you'd need to alter it to let you identify a single leaker from a given number of people.
> and the only tracking set up HBO seemed to be a watermark in the bottom left corner of the screen.
If they only had the one obvious watermark, I think HBO was hoping that maybe the people getting the screeners would think that there is more than one way they had the video tracked. Either the person who uploaded didn't care, or didn't think about it.
Its worth noting HBO has been on a path to make content available on the internet even without Cable (HBO now). probably a good long term strategy. There are always people who want it sooner, and free!
How can people so easily assume that the watermark was truly the only tracking present? HBO wouldn't immediately come out swinging even if they knew who or where the copy was leaked.
Thats an astute observation. Whenever you're tricking someone, you put something stupid easy in for the tricked person to defeat, so they assume they're tricking you.
But it could be even easier. Why not put the watermark in a different location for every copy you distribute?
The silly thing is that nobody seems to realize that the public has only seen 1 leaked copy, probably from 1 source. HBO could be using any number of techniques and none of us would notice any of them because we have a sample size of 1. Even the odd techniques OP describes could be present in the copy, your described technique as well, any number really. We won't see them unless they are as in-your-face as the watermark.
While using the millisecond length of things would be clever and would catch which copy it originated from while it remained secret that was how you were doing it. As soon as it was known it is not much harder for the person ripping the copy to shorten all the scenes by a random number of milliseconds than it is for them to blur the watermark.
I mean this could be a good addition to the current tech used in something like Cinavia, which is the most robust system I have seen and if not already doing it could easily identify individual sources. But the inaudible audio and steganography used in that system just seem much more of a pain to circumvent than using lengths of scenes as a serial number of sorts.
While this is cool idea, how possible would it be to extend any particular scene by that short of a time? If the video is output at a typical 24 fps, the shortest any scene could be modified would be ~42 ms. Even with a lot of newer footage being filmed at 48 fps, it's still only able to clipped at a rate of 21 ms.
Past that, I've seen a small amount of time shifting take place during a not-so-careful re-encode. At 1 ms precision, even this would be enough to throw off such a tracking system.
> Apart from that I think that binge-watching the first
> 4 episodes is a stupid idea that will make you ache
> for a month waiting for the 5th episode ☺.
For me, I find more enjoyment in binging shows than being drip-fed, I watched all 4 in a row and don't regret not waiting (besides I've waited 12 months I can wait a few more weeks for more.)
But more importantly, my online activity means I'll probably be spoiled before the 4th episode airs, not to mention people "predicting" events (read: passing off spoilers as theory) throughout the coming weeks. I'd rather not take that risk, personally, the cost of spoilers far outweighs the costs of waiting for me.
Yes, I was wondering why they sent 4 episodes for review. Then I watched the first episode and I saw why...nothing is going to happen until the 4th episode. They've been teasing us with white walkers since season 1. And those dragons too...they were born in season 1 or 2 and they've hardly killed anyone yet.
I guess I'm a sucker for the never-ending suspense...best show on tv.
The 'problem' is that there are relatively few minor characters. Though there are clearly some overarching plot lines, pretty much all the arcs are very important to the story.
As a result you've got to focus a little bit on each person and in a 55 minute show that means 5-10 minutes per story arc per episode. This only gets worse as more characters become important. It's somewhat balanced by other characters being killed off, mind!
Friend that have read the books say this is the same problem in the books. Nothing really happens. Things drag on and on.
I love watching GoT due to the high-quality production mixed with nudity and occasional awesome scenes. But I've given up on really enjoying much of the plot progress.
Maybe you are thinking of Fast Forward button in you player?
My time is precious to me, I stopped watching TV. Everything comes out of mplayer now, and if I cant fast forward whenever I want I simply dont touch that content.
That touchy feely 2 minute character building all talk no action scene between two insignificant parts in Walking Dead? Two clicks and its gone.
I'm the opposite. I love watching an episode then devouring every piece of online content about it over the next week. I subscribe to the subreddits (the GOT one will not allow discussion of the leaked episodes), enjoy every conspiracy theory, etc. etc. - compared to a show like House of Cards, where I just watch it and drop it.
I honestly think that there needs to be a compromise between the weekly releases common in TV and the season dumps common by streaming services like Netflix. Dumping the whole season at once doesn't allow any communal discussion or suspense, dragging it out over 2 months is meant more to drive revenue for the distributors than the enjoyment of the viewing public. I think releasing 3 episodes a week is probably the optimal strategy; it gives the show's communities time to confer and it keeps a reasonable pace without placing what some apparently feel is a demand to watch all 13 episodes in one sitting. It mitigates spoiler paranoia that you get with Netflix shows (which only further diminishes the communal aspects) and does other good things. I think it's all around the best strategy for the consumer. I understand Netflix uses binge releases as one of its selling points, but maybe now that they've established a respectable pedigree, they can stage some of their releases in iterations moving forward.
Yea I agree.
My co-workers were talking about Netflix's Daredevil series, and we ran into these exact issues.
We kept trying to avoid spoilers, we ended up just changing the topic.
It all seemed a little weird to me.
A compromise already exists. It's really very simple - you and friends agree on a pace to watch a show at.
This is flexible, and can fit any schedule! You and friends can watch in whatever pattern you want, and it requires exactly nothing of Netflix! You can deploy this method today!
This would unquestionably satisfy your needs. Why would you need anything other than a dump from Netflix?
It doesn't satisfy the needs of the larger community. Yes, if you watch in person with a group of a few friends and that's all you care about, this works fine. It can't realistically be implemented on the scale of something like a subreddit or a whole office.
There is a massive difference in both quality and activity between /r/HouseOfCards and /r/GameOfThrones. The "season dump" just doesn't work on a scale that exceeds one living room.
Communities are capable of organizing. Further, I submit that the needs of the larger community are served by a flexible dump. Subreddits and social circles are not the larger community - they're small, highly active communities.
/r/GameOfThrones has 484k subscribers. /r/HouseOfCards has 50k subscribers. These are not "small communities" and there's no reason that there should be 9.5x more interest in GoT than HoC; they're both gritty political thrillers and HoC usually has more episodes per season than GoT. I posit that the GoT sub is much more active because the way that HBO releases content makes communal watching and discussion much easier -- you don't have to worry about trying to coordinate episode watching times between 500k people, and people who can't make the official air time can avoid for 1-2 days before they find time and can get caught up.
I know Reddit and subreddits fairly well - most subscribers to a sub are silent and passive. 50k is a small community. Stacked against the whole of the viewerbase, 50k is even smaller a community. I posit that GoT is much more active because the show draws on a hugely engaging series of books that has been building a fanbase for a decade - an excellent reason for an 8x difference in size.
Bluntly, you're not making a compelling argument for taking flexibility away from the silent majority that watches and doesn't aggressively engage in public discussion. You're arguing from a position where the putative needs of that minority is the only thing that matters.
Anecdotally, I have three different friend groups I talk to about Game of Thrones. Everyone is always caught up, the line for book spoilers is obvious, and as a result its a common conversation topic anyone can join in on. Conversely, no one talks about House of Cards. We've tried a few times, but after a bunch of "I've watched it all," "I'm on episode 8," "Oh, I'm only on episode 5," etc. we just stopped bringing it up.
At the end of the day, television is just entertainment. And I get a lot more entertainment from being able to discuss drip-rate shows with friends.
>It doesn't satisfy the needs of the larger community.
Do you think there is a "need" missing in the larger TV watching community that must be addressed regarding the pace of releases? Should there be a vote after each TV show on how many days people need to think about the episode before the next one comes out?
I'm right there with you, there is quite a bit you can miss by NOT binging on a show stuff that you may forget over the span of a week but when watching them back-to-back you pick up on. Now some people might just say "well if you were half-way intelligent you would remember and get the long-running or episode-spanning jokes/themes/etc" but that's just how my memory works. I distill down to the facts I need and throw away much of the rest knowing I can always get them back if wanted (by re-watching). By binging I don't have time to forget the little things and it makes it more enjoyable to me. That said this doesn't mean I NEVER pick up on jokes/recurring themes just that I pick up on a lot more by binging.
I also agree with the spoilers. The cat is out of the bag and I'm not going to potentially ruin the show by waiting for each to air (and seeing spoilers or "theories") especially after waiting this long for the new season.
While everyone is thinking how awful this is for HBO, I wonder how much it will boost the future viewership not just of the reason but for the whole game of thrones show.
I imagine those who watched it early told all of their friends about the show, making them watch it too when it came out on TV.
All these methods meddle with films editor's jobs. And, the be frank, their job is much more important than considerations for piracy: they make the movie (or tv series) actually interesting. Making them do that (or changing their tools to support meta-data to do that) would be equal to bothering creative professionals who are essential to your product's success with mere details.
And, if I remember correctly, GoT producers already said in some interview that they're not that concerned with piracy anyway.
There's a difference between post-release piracy and pre-release bootlegging. I would be surprised if this leak doesn't noticeably dampen their view count for the first four eps. Although that's hard to measure.
Piracy is actually in their interest up to a point. It generates free advertising through free samples, and might lure new subscribers who are on the fence about buying. The endgame is they really want people to sign up for the whole package.
Why does the attacker need a second leak? Can they not just randomly clip each scene by a few milliseconds? This would defeat the identification, and not be noticeable to a viewer.
Anyone else here think HBO's missing out on a business opportunity? I wonder why they don't charge rabid fans (a _lot_) extra for early access to episodes. There appears to be a lot of demand for this.
This is happened anyway, and they are capturing none of this possible revenue. Even if only one person purchased the early access and leaked it to everyone else they'd still be one sale better off than they currently are.
Yes this has now happened one time. It doesn't happen every season. If you allowed early release of episodes to customers who were willing to pay more, you can pretty much guarantee that those will be leaked early every single time.
I don't mean they should charge $10 or $20 for early access. I think they should be charging a couple hundred dollars - think VIP bottle service prices. Human nature being what it is, I suspect that people who are willing to pay for that level of access won't want to share it with the rest of us proles.
If there was an option to just pay HBO per episode and then legally torrent the episode, I'd gladly do it in a heartbeat. Heck, it could be as simple as an HBO web page where I can donate an appropriate amount, and that would in turn legalize the download. I wouldn't even want them to digitize or host the content (they'd screw it up anyway). Sadly, that's not going to happen.
I think illegal filesharing threatens the industry primarily not because it's free, but because it offers a lot of features and convenience which the content providers refuse to grant their customers willingly.
> I think illegal filesharing threatens the industry primarily not because it's free, but because it offers a lot of features and convenience which the content providers refuse to grant their customers willingly.
It's a bit of a cycle isn't it? The reason they refuse to grant the convenience is because it enables illegal filesharing. Works the other way too.
Illegal filesharing doesn't need to be enabled, it's already happening regardless.
Incidentally, the argument that people would simply re-share illegally what they bought had been used against getting rid of DRM in audio files for a long time. Today the major music stores provide DRM-free music by default. Yes, these files can be shared, but considering the fact that they were already out there, the impact was minimal.
The only material difference between me using Napster in the nineties and me using iTunes right now is the fact that they're actually allowing me to pay for my music.
That's what I was thinking, too. Given that each frame is about 42ms, that's not a trivial oversight. Much easier would be to use stenography to slightly manipulate the color of sets of pixels in the video. Far more information available to mess with, and extremely easy to hide (do it in various corners of various frames, keep the secret carefully guarded, or only let parts of the "secret" out to different groups, so that no one person knows all of the manipulation information, except, perhaps a head of security coordinating the entire thing)
Can someone help me understand the negative impact of this leak? From what I can tell, the leak only benefits HBO. Viewership numbers in the age of time-shifting are worthless. Moreover, viewers now cost HBO money, in terms of server load during the peak viewership time. If even a small number of people avoided the broadcast during the premiere, HBO actually wins - and there's no telling how many people decided to subscribe to their new service after watching the leaked copy.
Anyone who remembers the first GoT streaming premieres, they were largely catastrophic on the the servers. Last night appears to have gone well. I'm beginning to think HBO leaked it themselves.
To elaborate, intellectual property law is essentially "use it or lose it" - a company that does not defend its IP against unauthorized use is likely to have it invalidated. One that actively promotes unauthorized use is almost certain to.
If HBO is not making a good-faith effort to secure for George R.R. Martin all the royalties that he is entitled to (which deliberately leaking GoT to torrent sites certainly would not be), then there isn't a court in the world that wouldn't consider HBO to be in breach of contract and return the TV rights to Martin.
> which deliberately leaking GoT to torrent sites certainly would not be
This is my central question that has not been answered. How is deliberately leaking GoT not beneficial to HBO? How does the company generate revenue from everyone watching it on their service at once (remember, HBO themselves mentioned that they don't mind piracy and the old joke is that for every one subscriber to HBO GO there are dozens of other, non-related people using those credentials)
Viewership numbers in the age of time-shifting are worthless
Do Comcast/TWC/DirecTV/Echostar feel that way? If even one person that was planning to subscribe to HBO over cable/satellite to watch this season decided to bail and watch the torrent instead, then the leak has economic impact. DVRs are irrelevant.
HBO doesn't want to encourage more people to go learn how to use bittorrent / usenet / streaming sites.
Someone who figures out how to get these episodes very well might just cancel HBO and get them all that way.
Though, a fairly credible rumor said that Showtime did strategic bittorent leaks. For a while almost every single season had the first two episodes leaked in high quality. Of course, it could have been one leaker just doing it each time.
I think it is pretty incredible that these leaks are not more common.
> Can someone help me understand the negative impact of this leak?
The best way to deal with piracy is by offering a better experience to customers than to pirates. Here, that would be HD + not having to look for a torrent server that isn't currently blocked in your country. Just as people rarely try to evade paying their train/tube tickets unless they're broke: their time and convenience isn't worth that sort of hassle.
Had it been a leak of one episode hours before it aired, it wouldn't have been detrimental to HBO. But 4 episodes at once mean pirates can get one month worth of binge watching, which is _the_ thing people want and TV channels can't offer. That means many paying HBO customers will watch the pirated version and ask themselves why they keep paying their subscription. Even those who choose not to watch the leaked versions, will no doubt experience some amount of frustration due to having to make that choice. And their are other minor inconveniences, such as having to avoid spoilers on forums.
Your point would have been completely valid, had GoT been produced by a binge-friendly media such as Netflix, though.
Why do we think the blur is sufficient? The blur loses information, but there are presumably a small number of watermarked versions, and a lot of frames. It's almost certainly possible for HBO to reverse-engineer the blur algorithm — I bet it's a stock option from a common tool — and then run it over all the originals and see which produces the best post-blur match.
Speaking as a former film/tv editor, one frame here or there can definitely affect the pacing and feel of a scene. Yes, sometimes external constraints—broadcast formats, licensing issues—can force compromises, but it's still an artistic decision where to cut a frame and where to keep one.
Much better to adjust coloring slightly in central but low entropy parts of occasional, appropriate frames, sort of like Omron rings[1], but designed specifically to be visually inconspicuous while surviving encoding.
The newish CineFence supposedly does something like this. In any case it wouldn't be hard to improve on the horrible Deluxe code.[2]
Now I'm eagerly awaiting a colorist jumping into this conversation to tell us why that would be unacceptable. (Agreed that it's probably less of an issue to encode data in color than timing, but it just strikes me as funny how we've passed the buck from programmer > editor > colorist)
Was talking to my partner about this and she had a pretty clever take:
"Seems like a simple idea would simply be to change just the spelling of one seemingly insignificant name near the end of each version of the credits and then by actually watching the credits you'd know the leaker straight away."
"Of course, you'd leave the watermark on there so the leaker doesn't know how you caught them and thinks that the watermark is still the tracking mechanism."
Hilariously, that wikipedia page uses an example from Game of Thrones. Tyrion tells different versions of a rumor to the various members of the king's council and successfully identifies who is an informant for Cersei.
Add a series of random names in the middle of Special Thanks. The names are in a list stored somewhere, so are actually (large base) digits of a serial number.
Trivially detectable. Find two screeners. Search for different frames. Oh look, the credits are different! Let's delete the credits to be safe!
You want to make it so that the entire binary content of the film looks different for each person, so there can be no point of reference apart from what it looks like (which is the same).
You're right about changing. Credit is very big deal for those who worked on it...
But in this wide world there are fans who painstakingly go through the credit and put the text online. Sometimes even special thanks. So a fake name could be detected, and once the m.o. is detected, in this networked age, everyone would know it and people will start looking for it.
Unsure how the credits work for Game of Thrones, but if it's like most shows where it's just the rolling black screen at the end of the show then most torrents cut that part off entirely by default.
Still waiting for some clever chap to cut the opening out as well. The dream would be to have one version of the opening and a mencoder script to put the pieces back together. It would shave a few dozens megabytes on each file off.
People have done this with Matroska playlists already for some series, although it's not always worth the amount of work that gets put into it. (For example, the opening might change from episode to episode so that spoiler characters aren't shown before they show up in the series.)
Or still shown after they are no longer on the show. I've considered cutting my videos to exclude the intro but it's not an exact science and sometimes the intro is different and I don't want to miss that. In the end most intros are not long enough to worry about cutting (though GoT is LONG). If it's long I can just FF through.
This is quite widely done for anime. The opening credits are actually different episode to episode for Game of Thrones both in people and the animation.
You're right, they're not just different but relevant to the episode, they can foreshadow or highlight the importance of a particular region to the current episode, remind viewers of the geography, emphasise the different factions. Much more than a static credit - the music is also a fantastic mood setter in this case. The different places are shown with slightly different flourishes too, unless I'm mistaken, the style of the credits is really good.
People won't do this for GoT in particular as the opening changes episode to episode and gives you a preview into the locations that that episode will deal with. A lot of people enjoy the openings and pay attention to them.
I liken it to the Simpsons or Futurama in the sense that things subtly change (e.g. locations which are destroyed in the show, are destroyed in the opening, and such).
Indeed. Not only this, but the opening credits also gives the names of the actors (which change from one episode to the next), director, writer etc. of the episode, which are unique to each episode.
Some release groups do this. It's incredibly annoying. It might have made sense a decade ago. Especially, I think, some of THORA's really high-quality rips. OK its 22GB. I've saved maybe half a GB doing this intro/outro in separate files. Does it really matter?
There are audio watermarks on these leaked videos, and potentially other video watermarks that might not be visible at first sight.
The watermark which has been blurred is a just a visual warning to the original receiver of the file to remind them that they have a special copy, it's not meant to act as a form of identification.
285 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadWhat the author of the article is proposing is actually a kind of steganography, albeit a rather crude one, and probably rather difficult to implement (since scene timings will be different for each episode, and you'll need to keep a separate log of exactly which timings correspond to each person you've distributed the file to), compared to running a video through a process that embeds a steganographically hidden id pattern at each keyframe.
You can also embed data in the audio channel by alternating between two imperceptible echo kernels for 1/0[2]. This is extremely compression resistant.
1: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumb...
2: http://www.slidefinder.net/a/audio_steganography_echo_data_h...
Lossy compression: discard all sub-threshold information.
Thus, in the general case it's fundamentally impossible. You can make a scheme that will survive certain known encoders and bitrates, but you can't make one that will survive all lossy compression.
The visible fingerprint might just have been there to deter the clueless. In any case even with a fingerprint its hard to proof without a doubt, the individual who actually stole it.
I don't think they need to prove that a certain individual stole it. The party which received the advanced copies likely had to take on liability, so HBO can go after them. Of course, that doesn't mean they won't turn around and lean on the actual culprit, but whether or not they catch someone HBO will have their due.
Watermarking is a deterrent to the people who upload the content in the first place. The ones who're careless about who they'll share things with. A unique watermark (steganographic or visible) is about finding the source of the leak. In that arms-race the entertainment industry is facing people who can remove a watermark - but we have no idea whether or not they're winning. The fact that torrents exist with watermarks intact makes me think that perhaps they are.
I would have gladly paid them to watch a stream at 8pm last night, yet somehow that still isn't an option in 2015.
Instead I ended up with 4 episodes from a torrent at 8:15. Tell me more about embracing new technology as it comes to market.
I googled around for about 15 minutes and was only able to find news articles announcing it. I'd be happy to pay them for what i've already watched if anyone could direct me to a sign-up for this elusive streaming service.
I don't have an iOS device or their specific supported ISP, so I haven't signed up.
HBO Now is Apple TV exclusive for 3 months.
I've heard of minor reviewers and third party firms getting cut off after a leak is traced to them, but for the most part the back office people simply don't have the power to enforce against anyone of note. Also the evidence just isn't enough for an actual law suit against someone who can hire a lawyer.
1: http://torrentfreak.com/super-8-screener-leaks-with-howard-s...
Pre-release screeners often have big ugly on-screen watermarks. Almost anything is better than a scrolling mid-screen line of text "PROPERTY OF STUDIO NAME DO NOT PIRATE THIS FILM".
The minimum difference in scene length allowable would be a single frame.
I wouldn't be surprised if MP4 (or other video formats) provided a mechanism for tweaking the timing of a given frame. Of course, if you're using such a primitive watermark you might as well just add a note in the metadata...
"Huh, this frame is supposed to be delayed by 3ms. Ah, screw it, [checks 'force to 23.97 fps' button]."
You know how annoying it is when you watch a movie and there's some sort of 2-dimensional 'hacker' character and s/he just says some gobbledegook about 'hacking the password' or whatever, you see something a progress bar briefly on screen, and then the actor says 'we're in!' In short, how stupid movies can be about computer topics? Well that's how it feels when someone who knows nothing about video formats or editing comes up with suggestions about adjusting the length between scenes by a few milliseconds and having it slightly different for every viewer.
It's where you read a page full of comments about something you really and truly deep know something about and see how very, every wrong nearly everyone is...
...then you go on to take every other page pretty seriously without remembering just how far off people were on the topic that you know about. I experienced this the other day when people were talking about beep.js on HN.
(xhe) http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel...
Thanks. Now I know the name for this.
Here's an example of a deliverables manual, from Netflix: http://newworlddistro.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/FullTec... You will get something similar from any broadcaster or video distributor. I'm not making careless extrapolations of my knowledge here, but telling you what the industry standards are. I have long involved email conversations about these things with distributors so that stuff I submit to them doesn't get sent back, triggering contractual penalty clauses for late/non-delivery that will make a producer cross with me.
not to mention how you would go about defining the ends of scenes...
no standard format that i am aware of has variable framerate. it makes no sense.
Split & merge frame by frame, in random, from multiple video sources. Visually they will be the same, but steganography has a high chance of been broken.
Disclaimer: I used to work at one of the leading companies in this field.
impressive!
Could you link to some papers? If you try to encode lots and lots of messages with different keys into the video, does it ruin the quality before ruining previous messages?
Sometimes, it's not about the money.
...but easy to explain (and sell?) to the entertainment industry, who have shown themselves to be mostly technically illiterate. Some cynical, unscrupulous hacker could probably extract a lot of money from them for such a service...
Given a known frame, they could blur the same portion of the same frame on all watermarked copies, and the one with a matching output is your culprit.
Blurring loses information, but is more akin to a hash than a deletion, as it's a deterministic process.
Edit: this sort of thing. http://dheera.net/projects/blur
Anyway, the horses have bolted and the damage is done.
You can if you have the original file, but then what's the point?
Otherwise, take image a=original+f1, image b=original+f2. Then if you e.g. average them you still have c=original+f1/2+f2/2 -- so both signatures are kept (theoretically if either you have a large number of sources you could average the signals out of existence, or perhaps the system isn't robust and can't detect multiple sigs). This assumes the introduced signatures are indistinguishable from the source (quite reasonable).
In short, don't try to film a movie in a theater; they will find you.
The author jumped to the conclusion that those don't exist, apparently because they aren't visible (but that's the point!) and that there is a visible watermark which the author apparently assumed was the only one (but it almost certainly isn't).
When I download a video from the Google Play Store I can only watch it for 24 hours or so. I thought there was already a highly protected digital signature/encryption system involved. Why is that not used for reporter previews?
The play store can stop you watching the content after 24 hours on the play store. It cannot possibly stop you recording your screen while it's playing and saving it forever
Preventing leaks is basically impossible, but making them traceable is possible using watermarks
Get two leaked copies, and mix them up. Use the credits from copy A, or hell, even chop off 11 milliseconds from them. Then mix and match scenes... even chop off a few ms from some randomly selected scenes.
I bet you wouldn't even need the two copies.
Maybe something like Cinavia[1] could be used instead? It's an analog watermarking system for detecting pirated copies and refusing to play them if player detects such copy is played on something else than bluray disc. Apparently this survives transcoding, and was/is major pain for people ripping their discs for various reasons and trying to play the files on certified players.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia
Step 2: Run the whole thing through an optimizer seeking to minimize error while not being detected.
Step 3: Wait a few hours.
Obviously I can come up with anything and you would be able to present a strategy how to beat it. But that's not the point.
If this kind of various copyright protections become norm, people might actually be afraid to leak stuff, because you will never know how safe it is and what kind of protection you might run into. Even after analyzing spectrogram and generally watching the media multiple times, trying to find anything weird.
Well, obviously when you grab infinite number of watermarked copies, you might be able see where the irregularities are. But that's not how leaks happen.
They could change the opening credits by 2ms. Or a specific scene.
They could even add a single extra sword 'clang' noise in part of the audio track on one single scene.
There are so many options.
this should be the biggest obstacle.
Disclaimer: I used to work for one of the companies providing these systems.
If they only had the one obvious watermark, I think HBO was hoping that maybe the people getting the screeners would think that there is more than one way they had the video tracked. Either the person who uploaded didn't care, or didn't think about it.
Its worth noting HBO has been on a path to make content available on the internet even without Cable (HBO now). probably a good long term strategy. There are always people who want it sooner, and free!
This is why we can't have nice things..
But it could be even easier. Why not put the watermark in a different location for every copy you distribute?
I mean this could be a good addition to the current tech used in something like Cinavia, which is the most robust system I have seen and if not already doing it could easily identify individual sources. But the inaudible audio and steganography used in that system just seem much more of a pain to circumvent than using lengths of scenes as a serial number of sorts.
Past that, I've seen a small amount of time shifting take place during a not-so-careful re-encode. At 1 ms precision, even this would be enough to throw off such a tracking system.
But more importantly, my online activity means I'll probably be spoiled before the 4th episode airs, not to mention people "predicting" events (read: passing off spoilers as theory) throughout the coming weeks. I'd rather not take that risk, personally, the cost of spoilers far outweighs the costs of waiting for me.
I guess I'm a sucker for the never-ending suspense...best show on tv.
As a result you've got to focus a little bit on each person and in a 55 minute show that means 5-10 minutes per story arc per episode. This only gets worse as more characters become important. It's somewhat balanced by other characters being killed off, mind!
I love watching GoT due to the high-quality production mixed with nudity and occasional awesome scenes. But I've given up on really enjoying much of the plot progress.
My time is precious to me, I stopped watching TV. Everything comes out of mplayer now, and if I cant fast forward whenever I want I simply dont touch that content.
That touchy feely 2 minute character building all talk no action scene between two insignificant parts in Walking Dead? Two clicks and its gone.
This is flexible, and can fit any schedule! You and friends can watch in whatever pattern you want, and it requires exactly nothing of Netflix! You can deploy this method today!
This would unquestionably satisfy your needs. Why would you need anything other than a dump from Netflix?
There is a massive difference in both quality and activity between /r/HouseOfCards and /r/GameOfThrones. The "season dump" just doesn't work on a scale that exceeds one living room.
Bluntly, you're not making a compelling argument for taking flexibility away from the silent majority that watches and doesn't aggressively engage in public discussion. You're arguing from a position where the putative needs of that minority is the only thing that matters.
At the end of the day, television is just entertainment. And I get a lot more entertainment from being able to discuss drip-rate shows with friends.
Do you think there is a "need" missing in the larger TV watching community that must be addressed regarding the pace of releases? Should there be a vote after each TV show on how many days people need to think about the episode before the next one comes out?
I also agree with the spoilers. The cat is out of the bag and I'm not going to potentially ruin the show by waiting for each to air (and seeing spoilers or "theories") especially after waiting this long for the new season.
I imagine those who watched it early told all of their friends about the show, making them watch it too when it came out on TV.
Also, editors would cringe at "varying the length of scenes".
And, if I remember correctly, GoT producers already said in some interview that they're not that concerned with piracy anyway.
I think illegal filesharing threatens the industry primarily not because it's free, but because it offers a lot of features and convenience which the content providers refuse to grant their customers willingly.
It's a bit of a cycle isn't it? The reason they refuse to grant the convenience is because it enables illegal filesharing. Works the other way too.
Illegal filesharing doesn't need to be enabled, it's already happening regardless.
Incidentally, the argument that people would simply re-share illegally what they bought had been used against getting rid of DRM in audio files for a long time. Today the major music stores provide DRM-free music by default. Yes, these files can be shared, but considering the fact that they were already out there, the impact was minimal.
The only material difference between me using Napster in the nineties and me using iTunes right now is the fact that they're actually allowing me to pay for my music.
the same ideas apply to frames, if you drop one from a scene you'd have to add it back elsewhere.
it just means comparing two copies would be easier to check for this technique than with a ms-based approach.
i think it also reduces your problem space as cutting a scene by over a few frames would be extremely obvious in most shows with competent editors.
Anyone who remembers the first GoT streaming premieres, they were largely catastrophic on the the servers. Last night appears to have gone well. I'm beginning to think HBO leaked it themselves.
This is my central question that has not been answered. How is deliberately leaking GoT not beneficial to HBO? How does the company generate revenue from everyone watching it on their service at once (remember, HBO themselves mentioned that they don't mind piracy and the old joke is that for every one subscriber to HBO GO there are dozens of other, non-related people using those credentials)
Do Comcast/TWC/DirecTV/Echostar feel that way? If even one person that was planning to subscribe to HBO over cable/satellite to watch this season decided to bail and watch the torrent instead, then the leak has economic impact. DVRs are irrelevant.
Someone who figures out how to get these episodes very well might just cancel HBO and get them all that way.
Though, a fairly credible rumor said that Showtime did strategic bittorent leaks. For a while almost every single season had the first two episodes leaked in high quality. Of course, it could have been one leaker just doing it each time.
I think it is pretty incredible that these leaks are not more common.
The best way to deal with piracy is by offering a better experience to customers than to pirates. Here, that would be HD + not having to look for a torrent server that isn't currently blocked in your country. Just as people rarely try to evade paying their train/tube tickets unless they're broke: their time and convenience isn't worth that sort of hassle.
Had it been a leak of one episode hours before it aired, it wouldn't have been detrimental to HBO. But 4 episodes at once mean pirates can get one month worth of binge watching, which is _the_ thing people want and TV channels can't offer. That means many paying HBO customers will watch the pirated version and ask themselves why they keep paying their subscription. Even those who choose not to watch the leaked versions, will no doubt experience some amount of frustration due to having to make that choice. And their are other minor inconveniences, such as having to avoid spoilers on forums.
Your point would have been completely valid, had GoT been produced by a binge-friendly media such as Netflix, though.
You could number 65k unique distributions that way and the overall length would rarely be affected by more than a frame or two.
It could be implemented with a pretty easy python script.
Much better to adjust coloring slightly in central but low entropy parts of occasional, appropriate frames, sort of like Omron rings[1], but designed specifically to be visually inconspicuous while surviving encoding.
The newish CineFence supposedly does something like this. In any case it wouldn't be hard to improve on the horrible Deluxe code.[2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coded_Anti-Piracy
It never ceases to amaze me how smart people consider their selves and how stupid consider the rest of the world are.
"Seems like a simple idea would simply be to change just the spelling of one seemingly insignificant name near the end of each version of the credits and then by actually watching the credits you'd know the leaker straight away."
"Of course, you'd leave the watermark on there so the leaker doesn't know how you caught them and thinks that the watermark is still the tracking mechanism."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
You want to make it so that the entire binary content of the film looks different for each person, so there can be no point of reference apart from what it looks like (which is the same).
But yes, once it was discovered that information was being embedded in the credits, those would be cut.
But in this wide world there are fans who painstakingly go through the credit and put the text online. Sometimes even special thanks. So a fake name could be detected, and once the m.o. is detected, in this networked age, everyone would know it and people will start looking for it.
I think you can tell I'm a fan!
I liken it to the Simpsons or Futurama in the sense that things subtly change (e.g. locations which are destroyed in the show, are destroyed in the opening, and such).
The watermark which has been blurred is a just a visual warning to the original receiver of the file to remind them that they have a special copy, it's not meant to act as a form of identification.