To be honest, when I heard that the files were protected with a watermark, I assumed that they actually meant a steganographic watermark. I thought that this tech had been adopted into the industry ages ago, I'm rather surprised if it isn't the case, given the arms-race between the media and illegal distribution.
Arms race? The entertainment industry has cantered out onto the jousting pitch with their horse and lance. Meanwhile illegal distribution is calibrating the laser cannons in their orbital battle station and dispatching their aircraft carrier battle groups.
I think you're wrong about the two sides. The guys with the orbital battle stations are the distribution channel. Watermarking isn't there to deter them, so their lasers don't matter.
Watermarking is a deterrent to the people who upload the content in the first place. The ones who're careless about who they'll share things with. A unique watermark (steganographic or visible) is about finding the source of the leak. In that arms-race the entertainment industry is facing people who can remove a watermark - but we have no idea whether or not they're winning. The fact that torrents exist with watermarks intact makes me think that perhaps they are.
The entertainment industry operates some 40 actual satellites that were put up into space using actual rockets, engages in petabyte-scale asset management as a matter of course, and constantly reworks its content acquisition pipelines as new digital and analog technologies come to market. We're a little bit more technologically sophisticated than you seem to imagine.
I remember hearing lots of noise about them offering a stand alone streaming service, I was even excited to try it out and see how it handled the traffic of a season premiere (HBOgo has been notably terribly on this front)
I googled around for about 15 minutes and was only able to find news articles announcing it. I'd be happy to pay them for what i've already watched if anyone could direct me to a sign-up for this elusive streaming service.
I don't think "arms race" really applies when the two sides are building entirely different weapons. The entertainment industry is interested in pursuing the source of leaks - as the other comments here have mentioned, they've gotten pretty good at it.
Your initial assumption was correct, it is widely deployed in the industry, there are multiple vendors that provide fingerprinting technology that is orders of magnitude more advanced then what the article suggests.
The visible fingerprint might just have been there to deter the clueless. In any case even with a fingerprint its hard to proof without a doubt, the individual who actually stole it.
The visible fingerprint might also be there to prove intent or add circumvention charges in court.
I don't think they need to prove that a certain individual stole it. The party which received the advanced copies likely had to take on liability, so HBO can go after them. Of course, that doesn't mean they won't turn around and lean on the actual culprit, but whether or not they catch someone HBO will have their due.
