While attendance numbers at the NAB Show in Las Vegas (April 18-22) are likely to be down this year, it’s still a major annual meet-up for broadcasters and content owners, especially for checking out new tech and trading notes about where the media industry is headed.

Protecting your intellectual property is becoming one of the most important issues in the creative industries today. Whether you’re a studio or sports rights holder, a YouTuber or an author, the value of your content can vanish overnight in a world of pirates, hackers, and ruthless AI.

For those headed to NAB next week, here some vendors worth chatting to and conference sessions worth attending to stay on top of the vital topic of content defense:

Video software company Synamedia (Booth W2851) will debut a new edge watermarking solution that aims to speed the disruption of pirated video streams by inserting watermarks at the CDN edge. Part of the company’s ContentArmor anti-piracy solution, ContentArmor Edge Watermarking should result in faster detection of leaks and – hopefully – speedier takedown of pirated content. ContentArmor Edge Watermarking is CDN-agnostic, but its first CDN integration will be with Synamedia’s own Fluid EdgeCDN.

According to Synamedia, traditional A/B watermarking relies on two distinct versions of the same encrypted content being cached in the CDN with a unique, scrambled sequence of A/B segments served to each user. Edge Watermarking can provide a more efficient and cost-effective alternative. The solution encodes the content once at the headend then distributes it through the CDN. At the edge, a lightweight watermarking agent inserts a unique identifier for each session on the fly.

French streaming tech providers Broadpeak (Booth W3034) will be showcasing its CDN security and anti-piracy solutions, along with its wider bouquet of streaming tech services.

The company’s security offering includes management at multiple levels, from node level to the system level. Node level integrations include scalable anti-DDOS (L3/L5 level), anonymous users ban, TLS/SSL management, per-segment token validation, video watermarking, and IP traffic filtering. System level security features include token sharing protection, centralized per-user quota management, video streaming specific rules, abnormal pattern detection, and geo-blocking.

Broadpeak also offers customers 24/7 integrated services managed by their Security Operation Center. These include investigation, rules management, auditing and benchmarks, and TLS certificate management. Last year the company partnered with content protection provider NAGRAVISION to deliver a next-generation streaming security solution for live sports content.

Stegawave is an Irish anti-piracy technology company focused on protecting live sports streams from being pirated on IPTV, commonly associated with so-called “dodgy box” services. The company’s Telescope feature searches private IPTV platforms where pirated streams are commonly distributed rather than crawling the open internet. Using AI to verify whether the content matches the stream being monitored, the system extracts the watermark and blocks the user at the CDN edge.

The platform includes proprietary watermarking technology that adapts to the content being shown so it remains invisible, along with safeguards to prevent pirates from using multiple accounts to hide the watermark through so-called collusion attacks. In addition to blocking compromised accounts, broadcasters can substitute alternative content for those specific users, such as the wrong stream or a slate image, disrupting the pirate feed.

The Stegawave team is scheduling meetings at the show and should be contacted directly at info@stegawave.com

EZDRM (Booth W2260) will be offering demos of its foundation DRMaaS (DRM as a service), which now has expanded support for ABR, WebRTC, WebRTS, and MOQ video delivery.

The company also offers a C2PA Video Signature Service which allows provenance data to be dynamically applied to VOD and live event video. EZDRM will also show off its new C2PA Provenance Signature Vault solution, which secures C2PA provenance data in the cloud.

Complementary to the company’s other solutions is EZDRM Precision Envelope Management which enables fine-grain envelope encryption in a video stream, including lossless rapid key rotation and HIPAA compliance.

Anti-piracy mainstays Verimatrix will be participating in the NAB conference program. The company’s Director of Product Management, Maria Malinkowitsch will join a session at the NAB Streaming Summit (see below), along with Lee Kent, head of anti-piracy at the beIN Media Group, to analyze piracy trends and practical strategies to shut down illegal streams at scale. The company’s raft of content protection solutions,include its Verimatrix Counterspy solution for detecting and shutting pirated streams, and Deepscan services for tracking down leaked content.

NAB Conference Sessions

Entry into these NAB Streaming Summit requires a NAB All Access Pass and Broadcast Engineering and IT (BEIT) Conference requires a NAB Premium Pass.

Sunday, April 19

2:45-3:45pm – Privacy-First AI Tools: Local Tools You Can Use Today (N219-N222)

This session is about AI tools that run locally. What’s available right now, what hardware you need, and how easy/hard these are to setup. The session will cover: local AI tools for editing, effects, and audio that work offline; hardware requirements and performance realities, and where and when local isn’t as good as cloud/subscription tools.

Monday, April 20

9-9:30am – Welcome, Overview of Show: The Importance of Trust in the AI Era (W211-W212) – Streaming Summit

Conference Chairman Dan Rayburn welcomes attendees to the Streaming Summit. Dan will highlight how in the age of AI, trust will become the most important currency with consumers and within the industry.

11:30am-12:30pm – Securing Distributed Broadcast Operations: Field Safety, Infrastructure Protection, and Modern Media Networks (N261) – Broadcast Engineering and IT (BEIT) Conference

This session features two panels focused on protecting distributed broadcast environments. The first addresses field operations, examining tower site safety, physical security, drone inspections, access control, and practical risk-management frameworks that safeguard crews and transmission infrastructure. The second, presented by Cisco, explores the challenges of decentralized media workflows—where AI-driven applications, massive data volumes, low-latency demands, and cybersecurity risks converge.

3-3:20pm – Evaluating Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities in SMPTE ST 2110 Media Networks (N256)

This paper presents a threat-lab environment for empirically evaluating cybersecurity risks in SMPTE ST 2110 and AMWA NMOS, based IP media workflows.

3-4pm – Securing and Scaling ST 2110: Cybersecurity, JPEG XS, and DPU-Accelerated IP Workflows (N256)

This session examines three critical pillars of modern ST 2110 environments: empirical cybersecurity testing that exposes hidden vulnerabilities in multicast and NMOS control planes; JPEG XS as a unifying mezzanine format bridging live IP and file-based production workflows; and performance optimization of ST 2110 applications on COTS hardware using DPUs to offload networking and JPEG XS processing.

3:15-3:45pm – Catching the Invisible: A Deep Learning Case Study in High-Velocity CDN Leeching and Piracy (W211-W212) – Streaming Summit

This presentation examines the engineering of a detection system designed to identify CDN “leeching” attacks that closely mimic legitimate user traffic.

4-4:30pm – A Global Broadcaster’s Observations on Piracy Trends, the Impact and Best Practices on Shutting Down Streams (W211-W212) – Streaming Summit

This session will explore how sophisticated piracy networks now seamlessly blend video and audio from multiple sources while also seeking to exploit inconsistent IP enforcement in general across large markets.

Tuesday, April 21

10:15-10:45am – Beyond the Firewall: Protecting the Next Generation of Media Assets (C2450) – TV and Radio HQ Theater

This session will explore how to secure the next generation of media assets in a borderless, cloud-driven ecosystem.

3:30-4:30pm – Securing and Scaling Agentic AI: Safe Conversational Control for Media Workflows (N261) – Broadcast Engineering and IT (BEIT) Conference

This session features two panels exploring the future of AI-driven control in content environments. Panel one focuses on defending conversational agents from emerging threats—prompt attacks, data leakage, and insecure outputs—using proven security frameworks and defense-in-depth safeguards. The follow-up panel looks at using agentic AI with SMPTE ST 2138 to enable plain-English control of broadcast devices across vendors and platforms.

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