Eindhoven, The Netherlands, May 7^th, 2015 – NexGuard, a Civolution company and the leading provider of forensic watermarking technology and solutions for protecting media content against illicit redistribution, today announced that it has strengthened its NexGuard management team through the appointment of PayTV industry expert Jean-Philippe Plantevin as Senior Vice-President Products and Solutions.

“I look forward to Jean-Philippe Plantevin contributing his 20 years’ experience in the PayTV technology industry to help drive NexGuard to the next level,” said Alex Terpstra, CEO, Civolution. “Forensic watermarking has a rapidly increasing role to play in PayTV content protection strategies and Jean-Philippe’s experience in conditional access, video compression and set-top box technologies will help us to accelerate our market traction further in this area.”

Prior to joining NexGuard, Jean-Philippe held senior management positions at DiviCom/Harmonic, Nagravision (a Kudelski company) and SagemCom. He has in-depth expertise of conditional access, consumer electronics devices and video compression technologies and brings valuable relationships with many of the leading PayTV service providers. Jean-Philippe will be based in NexGuard’s office in Rennes, France.

“It’s a very exciting time to join NexGuard and I look forward to being part of its future success,” said Jean-Philippe Plantevin, Senior Vice President Products and Solutions, NexGuard. “I clearly see two immediate drivers accelerating the adoption of forensic watermarking in premium PayTV services: the launch of Ultra-HD/4K services and live sports both fuel the growth of the illegal re-distribution of content. After various attacks on conditional access systems in the past, illegal re-distribution of video content is now rapidly becoming the biggest security threat, enabled by near global broadband Internet availability. To tackle this shift in piracy, encryption-based content protection strategies need to be supplemented by forensic watermarking to add ‘traceability’ of the piracy source. Being the world-wide market leader in forensic watermarking, NexGuard is best positioned to help the industry address this critical issue.”