Adjusting bit-stream video watermarking systems to cope with HTTP adaptive streaming transmission

HTTP adaptive streaming has become the dominant solution for broadband streaming delivery. Essentially, the server delivers small chunks of content in response to queries from a player, that can alternate between different qualities of content depending on its rendering capabilities and the network condition. In this paper, we highlight that the frequent switches of this popular delivery mechanism are deemed to interfere with the payload modulation of bit-stream video watermarking systems. We then propose a generic strategy to cope with such transmission and showcase its efficiency in practice with a watermarking system that operates directly in the H.264/AVC CABAC bit-stream. Eventually, we evaluate the robustness of the proposed solution against standard attacks.