Leading video software provider Synamedia has announced the launch of the industry’s first edge watermarking solution that enables faster disruption of pirated video streams. ContentArmor Edge Watermarking overcomes long-standing technical challenges by inserting watermarks at the CDN edge, resulting in the faster detection of leaks and removal of pirated content as well as reducing infrastructure requirements. The new solution is CDN-agnostic and the first CDN integration is with Synamedia Fluid EdgeCDN which is available now. It will debut at NAB 2026, marking ten years since ContentArmor was founded. 

A server-side solution that embeds unique watermarks directly into the compressed stream at the CDN edge, Synamedia ContentArmor Edge Watermarking cuts insertion and extraction times in half, reducing end-to-end session disruption time to below five minutes. Achieving such speeds is critical to protect live sports and other high-value content and events.

It also streamlines delivery and cuts delivery costs for VOD content by eliminating the need for two streams. This reduces bandwidth between the origin and the edge servers and within the edge server caches, which lowers infrastructure requirements and operational overheads.

Since its inception in 2016, ContentArmor had a vision for edge watermarking but technical constraints  – including limited CPU capacity and the absence of DRM encryption keys on edge server – made deployment impossible. The industry instead relied on A/B watermarking, where two distinct versions of the same encrypted content are cached in the CDN and aunique, scrambled sequence of A/B segments is served to each user. While A/B watermarking is effective, Edge Watermarking provides many new benefits as streamers look for new ways to fight piracy faster and cost-effectively.

The new solution works by encoding the content once at the headend then distributing it through the CDN. Then, at the edge, a lightweight watermarking agent inserts a unique identifier for each session on the fly. The watermark is extracted faster than A/B watermarking thanks to a higher bit density.

Alain Durand, senior director at Synamedia, said, “This product is the result of a ten-year journey to make server-side forensic watermarking possible at the edge. Since Content Armorwas founded in 2016, we understood the potential of edge watermarking, but it wasn’t technically feasible or scalable until now. As the only provider offering server-side watermarking in the compressed bitstream, together with Synamedia’s CDN expertise, we have overcome technical challenges, integrated watermarking directly with the CDN for the first time, and achieved the scalability needed to support live streaming.”