Castlabs and Backlight announced an integration that brings Castlabs’ cloud multi-DRM service, DRMtoday, and single-frame forensic watermarking technology, STARDUSTmark, into Backlight’s Iconik, the creative operations and media asset management (MAM) platform, making Iconik the first of its kind to support frame-accurate forensic watermarking.

The integration automatically applies protection to proxy media generated in Iconik, helping studios, broadcasters, sports-rights holders, production teams, and post-production facilities secure creative workflows before content reaches distribution. Proxy files can be protected with DRMtoday-backed playback authorization and access enforcement. STARDUSTmark embeds imperceptible forensic watermarks that support leak tracing back to individual assets and sessions, even if only a single frame leaks.

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Closing the proxy security gap

Proxy files are essential to modern production, powering editing, review, approvals, localization, vendor collaboration, and remote post-production. Yet these files often move through distributed creative workflows without the same level of protection that mezzanine or distribution assets receive.

By bringing DRM and forensic watermarking directly into Iconik, Castlabs and Backlight help close that security gap while preserving the speed, visual fidelity, and flexibility creative teams expect. STARDUSTmark is designed for modern production workflows, combining lightweight, low-latency watermark embedding with single-frame forensic extraction — avoiding both the long clip dependency of traditional watermarking approaches and the processing overhead often associated with current AI-based watermark embedding models, which can introduce more disruptive visible artifacts within creative and editorial workflows.

“Proxy media is central to modern production workflows, and proxies move through more hands than any other file in the pipeline. But they have not always carried the same level of protection as final distribution assets,” said Rory McGregor, SVP Studios at Backlight. “By integrating DRMtoday and STARDUSTmark into Iconik, every proxy carries DRM and a single-frame forensic watermark by default, so the working copy is protected. Plus, we’re giving customers an easy way to protect and trace content directly within the asset management and collaboration workflows they already use.”

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“Creative collaboration shouldn’t create security blind spots,” said James Hynard, Business Development Manager for Content Distribution and Security at Castlabs. “Together with Backlight, we’re extending DRM enforcement and forensic traceability into the proxy workflows where valuable content is reviewed, shared, and shaped. This helps teams protect content consistently from the earliest stages of handling, without adding friction to the creative process.”

Built into the workflow

The integration operates natively within Iconik’s cloud media management environment and is designed to require no change to existing collaboration processes. Users continue working with proxy media as usual, while content protection is applied automatically as part of the workflow.