At CES 2015 in Las Vegas, the integration of Seavolution's content protection solution with ST's UHD 4K System-on-Chip (SoC) was announced, enabling support for security services for consumer electronics manufacturers' Ultra HD-4K TVs and protecting content owners.

January 16, 2015, Seoul – STMicroelectronics (ST), a global semiconductor company contributing to customers across various electronic applications, and Civolution, a leader in content identification, management, and monetization technologies and solutions, announced that Civolution’s NexGuard forensic watermarking technology will be integrated into ST’s UHD 4K Cannes and Monaco SoC products to detect unauthorized sharing of digital content and prevent piracy.

Forensic watermarking is a technology that embeds undetectable, special identification codes into media assets, including movies, videos, and all types of content. By spreading a unique ID across the media, it enables the identification of the content along with its owner. Digital watermarks are used to reinforce contractual compliance between content owners and recipients, and can be utilized to verify the misuse of content or to trace back the source of leaks. ST intends to ensure that these state-of-the-art set-top box chipsets can respond more strongly to digital content piracy by incorporating Seavolution's NexGuard into its UHD-4K Cannes (STiH314/318) and Monaco (STiH414/418) SoC products.

ST's Cannes and Monaco SoCs already support Conditional Access (CA) and Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems to efficiently implement next-generation 4K TV (broadcast and internet) services. By adding Seavolution's NexGuard, the level has been enhanced to satisfy the MovieLabs guidelines as well. To achieve this, 4K content distribution and playback platforms are required to support encryption methods, secure media pipelines, hardware Root of Trust (ROT) for protecting studio content, as well as forensic watermarking, to securely mark video on the server or client side to detect agreement violations and easily locate their positions.

"Sevolution CEO Alex Terpstra stated, 'Sevolution and ST are collaborating to add support for industry-leading digital watermarking solutions to the Cannes and Monaco SoCs for UHD 4K services.' He added, 'As a leading provider of forensic watermarking for premieres, digital cinema, pay TV broadcasting, and streaming, we are proud to have our solutions integrated into the Cannes and Monaco chipsets through close collaboration with ST.'" “This integration further solidifies NexGuard’s position as the provider of best-in-class innovative technology for premium content protection,” he said.

Philippe Notton, ST Group Vice President and Head of Consumer Business Unit, said, “The active global adoption of ST’s Cannes and Monaco SoCs is due to their design based on powerful ARM® multicore processors, which includes an integrated hardware Faroudja® multimedia subsystem featuring excellent 2D/3D graphics performance and a robust video decoder with HEVC capabilities. Seavolution’s NexGuard forensic watermarking technology has been added to the Cannes/Monaco security toolbox for UHD 4K premium content, further complementing the excellent security features and enhancing the level of content copyright protection.”