AWS Elemental MediaLive adds support for A/B forensic watermarking

Posted on: Sep 10, 2026

AWS Elemental MediaLive now supports A/B forensic watermarking, enabling content owners to trace the source of unauthorized redistribution of live video content. A single MediaLive channel produces two synchronized output variants, each carrying a distinct visually transparent watermark that persists through re-encoding and screen capture. Downstream packaging and CDN infrastructure assembles these variants into unique per-session sequences that identify the origin of leaked content.

Forensic watermarking follows the DASH Industry Forum (DASH-IF) specification for A/B watermarking (European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) TS 104 002), ensuring interoperability with standards-compliant packagers and CDN infrastructure. Customers can configure watermarking on Common Media Application Format (CMAF) Ingest output groups through the MediaLive API or console. MediaLive delivers watermarked A and B variants via CMAF ingest to AWS Elemental MediaPackage or third-party packagers, enabling downstream per-session watermark assembly through compatible CDN infrastructure including Amazon CloudFront.

To learn more, visit the AWS Elemental MediaLive User Guide.

A/B forensic watermarking is available in all AWS Regions where AWS Elemental MediaLive is available.