Overview
Forensic watermarking is a feature available on RePro Enterprise plans and can also be added to Flex plans – speak to sales for more information. It provides a secure and invisible way to trace video leaks back to individual users, without impacting picture quality or playback performance.
What is Forensic Watermarking?
Forensic watermarking works by embedding a unique identifier into each user's video streams during playback – directly on the viewer’s device. This means every user receives a uniquely marked version of the video, allowing precise traceability if the content is captured or leaked.
Unlike server-side watermarking, which applies a fixed mark during file processing or CDN distribution, forensic watermarking is dynamic. It occurs in real time, ensuring that every playback session is uniquely identifiable.
How It Works in RePro
When streaming, RePro automatically applies a user-specific watermark to each viewer’s playback. This watermark is:
• Unnoticeable – It does not affect the visible image quality in any way.
• Persistent – It survives screen recordings, re-encodes, cropping, and common post-processing.
• Traceable – If leaked content is recovered, RePro can analyse the video to identify the original viewer.
Enterprise plans. Forensic watermarking is included in the plan. RePro enables it for your organisation during onboarding, and it can be set to default on.
Flex plans. Forensic watermarking is available as an add-on. RePro provisions it against your plan on request – speak to sales – after which it is switched on per Project by you or by RePro Support.
On both plans, the per-Project Enable Watermark control is what activates watermarking for a given show. Enabling it for the organisation makes it available; the Project control turns it on.
Benefits
Studio-Grade Security. Meets the security expectations of studios, streamers, and production partners.
Session-Level Identification. Each stream is uniquely watermarked, enabling user-specific traceability.
Configurable by admins – default is across the project but key users can be added to a whitelist if it is not required or desired.
Common Use Cases
Internal studio or executive review sessions
Vendor and VFX pipeline sharing
Early access distribution before release
Secure collaboration on confidential content
Configuring Forensic Watermarking
Once forensic watermarking has been enabled for your organisation you can turn it on per project in the project settings.
Make sure your project is selected in the top-left project dropdown.
Click Project Admin > Live Streaming and select Settings at the bottom of the Live Streaming options.
On the settings page scroll down until you find the 'Forensic Watermarking' sections.
Click Enable Watermark to turn it on for the project.
Set the desired strength. Level 4 is Castlabs' recommended default level.
Please note: increasing the level may result in visible artefacts in the image. It is recommended, when choosing to increase the level, to test and ensure you are satisfied with the results.Head to the User Groups section...
Click 'Users & Groups' > User Groups.
Then click 'All Project Users' Group at the top.
Ensure 'Skip Forensic Watermark' is set to 'off' (the default).
Check all groups created for the same setting to 'off' to be sure all groups are not skipping forensic watermarking.
If you wish for a specific group to skip watermarking then enable the 'Skip Forensic Watermark' feature for that group.
Skipping Forensic Watermarking is an additive permission – this means if any user is in another group that does not have the 'skip' set but is in a group that does have it set then they will skip it for the channels set in that group
ℹ️ Additive permissions for skipping are specific to only the users in that group but also importantly only the channels set in that group.
For example:
Users A and B are in Group 1 and that has access to Channel X and Channel Y and Group 1 does nothave skip watermark enabled.
But user B is also in Group 2 that doeshave skip watermark enabled, but only has Channel Y enabled for that group.
User A would get watermarking in both channels.
User B would get watermarking in Channel X but would skip it in Channel Y due to the additive permission in Group 2.
Capture Protection
Where Forensic Watermarking is enforced for a viewing user, 'Capture Protection' is enforced on them as well, on both iOS and tvOS. Capture Protection works differently on iOS and tvOS.
On iOS:
When they take a system screenshot all players are blanked out prior to the screenshot being taken.
They are warned by a full-screen page that screenshots are not allowed and they need to tap to dismiss.
If they start a screen recording the players are blanked out and audio is muted. This is if they start a screen recording whilst in the RePro Viewer app or open the RePro Viewer app whilst a screen recording is already underway.
They are warned by a full-screen page and the only way to view the players again is to stop the screen recording.
AirPlay is also blocked during capture protection.
On tvOS: Apple TV has no user-facing screenshot function. Screen mirroring and recording of the Apple TV are blocked: the players blank and audio mutes for as long as the attempt continues, and the viewer is shown a notice explaining why.
ℹ️ Read the Platform Access article for further security enhancements so you can enforce viewing access via specific iOS, tvOS and Web client viewing platforms.
Need Help?
If you have questions about how forensic watermarking works in RePro, or need to request watermark analysis on leaked content, please contact us using our help messenger or by emailing [email protected].