SSAI Stream Security and the Shift to Watermarking at the Edge
For ad-supported streams, one of the many benefits of server-side ad insertion (SSAI) is the ability to protect the stream against piracy by encrypting it at the point of origin when the ad is already inserted in the bitstream. Bu for premium sports streams that are subject to what BuyDRM CEO Christopher Levy calls “high-value gate-crashing”—sophisticated piracy ring-level content theft—watermarking at the edge has become “the model that works the best,” Levy says, as he enumerates the reasons for a growing shift to edge-side watermarking in this interview with Streaming Media’s Tim Siglin at Streaming Media Connect 2025.
Why server-side ad insertion (SSAI) emerged
Siglin talks about how ads were inserted into streams in the earlier days of streaming, causing buffering issues and leading to the development of ad blockers. However, oftentimes the ad blockers would cause a blank screen to appear where the ad was supposed to play. This ultimately led to the development of server-side ad insertion (SSAI). This allowed the ad to go directly into the content, enabling a seamless stream to go out to the end user.
How edge-side watermarking has become crucial
“Part of [SSAI development] was a technical solve, part of it was a financial solve,” Siglin says. “Taking that model and talking about watermarking at the edge, let's go ahead and jump to that.” To Levy, he says, “You and I talked about how there's been a lot of [movement towards] edge side insertion of watermarking versus origin side. Is it similar to the SSAI versus client-side ad insert from a financial standpoint, or is it sort of equally the same from a financial standpoint between those two decision points?”
Levy discusses how edge-side watermarking, particularly for high-value live events like sports, has become crucial due to increased piracy during the pandemic.
“We always had pointer files or meta files or playlist files, which were ultimately converted into manifest for DASH and HLS which is kind of where we are today,” he says. “We've seen a lot of evolution around that. The problem with having a pointer file, a meta file, a playlist, and a manifest is that it's not a secure thing. So, people can get into them and disassemble them. And even today, if you have an improperly manufactured manifest for let's say a bunch of different live DASH channels, somebody with just basic rotary skills can capture the bit range that's inside the manifest and quickly determine, well, this is the live TV stream, this is the ad server stream and divest the two.
“And so that it's easier to protect one linear stream that's being encrypted, that at the point of origin has the ad inserted into the Bitstream. Then, like you said, to be rolling along playing a premium piece of content, and suddenly in the background your player's caching an ad stream, and then the player stops what it's doing, cuts over to the ad stream, and then comes back. That's harder to protect. There are a lot more moving parts, and there are a lot more opportunities for latency and failure. That's how server side advertising came into play, and I think that's why DRM works so well on AVOD and FAST. But pivoting out of that, when you move into this kind of high value gate crash…live sporting events, things like cricket and European football or live NFL events, we have a lot of experience with that on Thursday nights with Twitch and stuff there, you get that gate crash. You must be able to do the watermarking at the edge because you're incapable of fetching back from the origin through your network to the edge server through a cache, a unique stream for each user.
“In about 2021 piracy started to really warm up with everybody locked in their homes and people not able to go to the theaters and more time to mingle and dingle in people's stuff and learn tools and talk online. We saw piracy start to really creep. I think a lot of the conditional access service companies, CAST companies as we call them, who also offered DRM, partnered with the market-leading content delivery networks to move that watermarking function to the edge. For A/B watermarking, and for live sporting events, and these types of live entertainment, they're typically subscription events. There are very few live events that are ad-supported. So, in that model, they're just shifting the compute resource. Instead of stuffing ads, they're moving it to the edge to do the A/B watermarking."
The ways this shift reflects a business model where users pay for premium content, justifying the increased expenses
Levy highlights how this shift reflects a business model where users pay for premium content, justifying the increased expenses.
“For premium paid live sports slash entertainment model, that's really the model that works the best,” he says. “Those are the pros and the cons to it. The cons to it are that now that you're running the watermarking on the CDN as an edge function, you've increased your cost per unit to deliver the content because now you've got to pay the watermarking vendor for the use of their technology at the edge. You've got to pay the content delivery network for the compute functions that are running the watermarking at the edge. You have some additional storage costs because you're transmitting two different versions of the movie’s files to the edge, where they're being randomly spliced back together using an algorithm. So, you shift the cost center from inserting the ads on the server side to doing the watermarking at the edge. And I think that's based on the shift in the business model where the user's paying for the content. That makes sense.”
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