Cloud Keynote: Sony Exec Recommends Learning from Piracy (ETC Centric)
Sony DADC NMS (New Media Services) CTO and head of strategy Andy Shenkler keynoted ETC’s Cloud Innovation Conference at NAB 2016 in Las Vegas. Rather than talk pure technology about the cloud, Shenkler preferred a more unique angle: piracy. “The place I want to start is around competition in the OTT space specifically,” he said. “When we talk about OTT, the usual suspects are Hulu, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, HBO GO, and so on. But we’re not really looking at the biggest competitor out there: piracy.”
To push his point home, Shenkler noted that the top ten pirated movies have been downloaded 465,409,843 times. “Piracy is seamless and easy,” he said. “Pirates want to steal from us — let’s steal from them. Five minutes after the broadcast is over, they have it everywhere. They do global distribution very effectively.”
He highlighted three popular piracy sites: Couch Potato for movie downloads; Sick Beard for TV and series downloads; and SAB, a download agent that looks for torrents, and showed a workflow found on the Internet that is designed to show people how to configure their home systems to download pirated copies and store them in files.